Biology of the Worst Kind

I've started a new blog - This And That Continued - at www.jennydiski.wordpress.com

The paperback of my most recent book, What I Don't Know About Animals, is now available. You might like to read it.

The Sixties - out now in paperback

The Sixties is out now in paperback with an ancient picture of me on the cover as hippie. I looked younger and surrounded by foliage. That's how it was then.

Updates - 2 July 2010

I'll be adding updating info, writing occasional new blogs, and adding pieces of writing on the This and That page at my web site: www.jennydiski.co.uk, so please check there.

Rape-Rape

This is part of my Diary piece in the latest London Review of Books: Read all of it here

(See also the latest from Bernard-Henri Lévi in the Huffington Post)

In 1961 I was raped by an American in London. I was 14, a year older than the girl Polanski gave half a Quaalude and champagne to, then had oral, vaginal and anal sex with. In defence of Polanski, various people have pointed out Geimer was a teenage model and was doing a photo-shoot her mother had fixed up with Polanski, who said he wanted to take the pictures for Vogue. As further evidence to mitigate Polanski’s crime people have pointed out that after she had been drinking champagne (encouraged by Polanski during the photo session) Polanski got into a jacuzzi and suggested she join him, but she said she had to go home. He phoned her mother and said she would be late, then he let her speak to her mother. Geimer replied ‘no’ when her mother asked if she wanted to be picked up and taken home, and she consented, according to one telling, though this isn’t clear in the grand jury transcript, to oral sex. She also told the judge that she’d had sex twice before with her boyfriend, who was around her own age.

What got my interest finally and fully engaged was the idea of a 13-year-old consenting to have oral sex with a 44-year-old film director. Not, of course, that children aren’t sexual or even apparently complicit sometimes in sexual play. She was clearly not an innocent. (Though previous sexual experience is not a bar to a rape conviction even where the victim is over the age of consent.) Nevertheless, in order for her to consent to oral sex, Polanski must have asked her. How did he ask? Some questions are more like questions than others. What is it like to be 13, a wannabe movie star (nearly all 13-year-olds are), in the presence of a powerful movie director in the house of a famous movie star (Jack Nicholson), being given a powerful drug and alcohol and then invited to give the great man a blow job or make yourself available for cunnilingus?

I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14 – I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But 14 is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my 14 was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent....(The Whole Article)

All Eat All - from the latest London Review of Books

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten) and sentenced to eight years. He was retried on appeal for first-degree murder on the grounds that Bernd might not have been in a position to consent once his penis had been severed and the blood loss taken its intellectual toll. Armin Meiwes was given life. So far so goggable, but then Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained, ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and a green pepper sauce,’ and you begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment. More here

Woof

From The Sunday Times

November 23, 2008

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

A wolf-dog is fighting with a pit bull terrier, probably to the death. A man, who has been pumping iron in order to keep pace with the power of his wolf-dog, grabs the embattled 120lb animal by the scruff, lifts it off the ground so they are eyeball to eyeball, and whispers, “Do you want a bit of me, son?”

By way of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the older ladies with cats that Mark Rowlands refers to in passing in this emotionally lamentable memoir and meditation about himself as a young man with his dog. Rowlands was in his twenties when he bought Brenin, a hybrid wolf-dog puppy. It was the early 1990s and he was lecturing in philosophy at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his spare time he hung out with the students, getting through a bottle or two of bourbon a night, playing rugby and lending Brenin to his team mates because, of all their big, bold dogs, Brenin was the best “chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly different expression: more colourful, but not really repeatable”. There is a good deal more testosterone in this autobiography than an older cat-keeping lady can easily relate to. The book is largely a distillation of Rowlands's personal philosophy (evolved during his decade-long relationship with Brenin) but even the philosophy seems to drip with male hormone.

Rowlands's initial training of Brenin is a serious business, which he justifies with Nietzsche's comment that those who cannot discipline themselves need someone to do it for them. Choke chains and a knee sharply in his side when he goes the wrong way show Brenin “the consequences of his actions”, after which the wolf-dog is not enslaved, but ready to participate in the ancient man-and-dog pack relationship, so much better, more decent than our usual apelike human social contract. Perhaps it is not a surprise to discover that parallel to the testosterone, misanthropy and hard-man philosophy here, possibly even an essential part of them, lies a gross sentimentality. The wolf, Rowlands believes, speaks to a part of the human soul that was buried deep when mammalian evolution branched out to our own ancestral primates. They are our ancient, noble-savage selves.

He proposes one of those great simplifying divisions people love so much (Mars/Venus, us/them) and pits our Machiavellian simian intelligence against the way of the wolf. Apes: bad, wolves: good. Humans, being apes, suffer from the requirements of social relations that caused us to develop the capacity to deceive, the necessity to lie, an addiction to sex as pleasure, the compulsion to make alliances and to scheme with and against our fellows. Yes, we have a well-developed moral sense and laws to go with it but, Rowlands explains, “Only a truly nasty animal would have need of these concepts.”

Wolves, conversely, don't require social contracts, they have pack loyalty, the philia of the Greeks, no need for deception and a capacity for passion that might cause them to kill each other in a fight, but not to scheme against their fellows. We humans make excuses for our wrongdoings (deprived childhood, mental disorder), while wolves commit only crimes of passion and take whatever violent punishment results. These temper tantrums, claims Rowlands, deserve less condemnation than crimes of intention, though it's always struck me that the victim is just as dead or crippled whatever the degree of spontaneity involved.

Rowlands's thesis is that the wolf exists solely in moments, while we are cursed by a knowledge of time and, therefore, an awareness of inescapable death. Withdrawing from society (“I was sick of humans. I needed to get their stench out of my nostrils”), he went off with Brenin and attempted to learn the lesson of the wolf. I'm not unfamiliar with Rowlands's sense of disgust for humans, but the question is whether one can exclude oneself from the disgust by taking on the supposed way of the wolf.

Living in moments does not require the wolf or the wolf-living man to find an overarching meaning in life, unlike the rest of us humans who search incessantly for purpose, setting and trying to achieve goals that can only result in disappointment. We know that in the end we will be extinguished. This makes us weak: “The ape that I am is a crabbed, graceless creature that deals in weakness; a weakness that it manufactures in others, and a weakness with which it is ultimately infected. It is this weakness that permits evil - moral evil - a foothold in the world. The art of the wolf is grounded in its strength.” If this has an Ubermenschian chill, Rowlands is clear that you must, when the chips are down, “live your life with the coldness of the wolf”.

The passionate and unswerving pack loyalty Rowlands learnt from his wolf would mean, he tells his students, that if one of them found themselves in a two-person lifeboat with Brenin and his master, Rowlands would pitch the student overboard. The students think he's joking. He isn't, but the other possible solution, that he himself go overboard to save dog and student, doesn't seem to occur to him.

Rowlands goes through a dark, epiphanic month of hell when Brenin gets an infection and needs constant care that still may not save his life (he survives the infection, but dies a year later of the cancer that caused the infection). This is what life is all about, apparently. Not the good moments, but the moments when you are the best of yourself, regardless of hope for a desired outcome. Brenin's moment was as a two-month pup, when, pinned down by a pit bull ready to kill him, he growled his “defiance” at being overcome, and scorned death and its agent.

Maybe us cat ladies just don't get it, but it does strike me that we might respect the dignity of animals more by recognising their otherness than by romanticising and making morality out of them. If we see animals as having lessons for us, or providing us with a way out of our culpability for overmastering the natural world, then aren't we using them as surely as when we eat their flesh?

The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands
Granta Books £15.99 pp256

Book of a Lifetime Independent October 2008

My Book Of A Lifetime: The Essays, By Michel de Montaigne

Reviewed by Jenny Diski

Friday, 31 October 2008

In 1585 Marie de Gournay, an awkward 18-year-old who spent her days mooching in her father's small library, read the first two volumes of The Essays by Michel de Montaigne, then a man in his mid-fifties. She fell immediately in love. Her mother administered a dose of hellebore to bring her back to her senses, but she determined that one day she would meet the writer, because in all the world no one understood his remarkable work so well as she. Three years later, she did meet him, and he spent several weeks in her house in Picardy recuperating from an illness and wallowing in her adoration. After his death she became his editor. A reader's dream came true.

Marie de Gournay was just the first of many readers to be seduced by Montaigne and to be made to feel by his writing that he spoke directly to them. Montaigne has stood by my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, too, though, of necessity, he is more ectoplasmic these days.

It's not just Montaigne; all avid readers know that the best writers rank with the great seducers. Montaigne was quite brazen about it. He wrote about himself candidly as no one had done before: "I am the matter of my book." He described what and how he liked to eat (greedily, biting his fingers in his haste), how he preferred making love (in bed, not standing up), how often he emptied his bowels, that one must fulfil the letter of one's duty to family and work, but always keep a back room in the shop for oneself and, above all, what it meant to have had a true friend and lost him.

He retired to his tower to write about life and discovered that he was his own subject of investigation. Learning about himself was the only possible channel through which to interrogate the larger world. But in writing himself down he was also signalling – quite consciously – to someone he had yet to meet to fill the empty place that solitary writing left. "Besides this profit that I derive from writing about myself, I hope for this other advantage, that if it my humours happen to please and suit some worthy man before I die, he will try to meet me... If by such good signs I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him... Oh, a friend!" Such a person need only "whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone".

Of course, he meant me. Every reader of Montaigne knows that they are the very one he was speaking to. That manipulation by the solitary writer of the solitary reader is the secret, erotic space of reading. It works very rarely, but when it does, centuries don't matter, nor the actuality of the writer's life. We are their best and only reader. Montaigne – and all those others – reach out from their towers and make intimate contact and keep us mooching in libraries.

Jenny Diski's novel 'Apology for the Woman Writing' is published by Virago

Mark Steel & William Leith Review. Guardian August 2008

Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years by William Leith 208pp, Bloomsbury, £10.99 

What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion by Mark Steel 256pp, Simon & Schuster, £12.99 

The lack of a proper bed brings it home, it seems. So when comedian Mark Steel and journalist William Leith find themselves sleeping (separately) on a settee in the living room and a mattress in the office, the parlous state of the world synergises with the meaning of being over 40, and each bursts into publication. There are the kids, wife or girlfriend, house and proper bed on the one hand; and there's Steel and Leith cut loose from the bosom of, back to square one, personal inadequacies, the Iraq war, entropy, greed, the failure of socialism, the implacability of biology, on the other. And time - marching onward. Exactly how the state of the world bleeds into their personal pain differs according to each author's general relation to the world. Leith's self-obsession - his hypochondria, his lack of sustained relationships or continuing professional success - overwhelms current events, so that the state of the world serves mostly to point up his private miseries. He details the minute interior deaths within the body (ageing, that is), cellular misreadings, dramatising them as the heroic and dastardly doings of goodies and baddies, citing Saving Private Ryan and The Great Escape. His favourite books by the likes of Richard Ford, Amis and Updike have the kind of loser heroes a man can surreptitiously look up to, and Leith's own loserness reads more like strutting than real self-hatred. He rants against the world (ventriloquising Philip Roth), tries to meander into metaphors of science and war mildly and insidiously (like Vonnegut), pontificates (like Bellow) and makes broad and shallow sociological and political observations (like Tom Wolfe), all in a parroty, man-at-the-end-of-his-tether stream of consciousness. Leith suggests that Mel Gibson has summed up the human situation in Apocalypto, when a one-armed sage announces that man's essential problem is that "he wants too much, and eventually the earth has no more to give". How miserable must the human situation be if Mel Gibson has the answer to it? Leith's own need for a mortgage sets off a disquisition on the history and nature of capitalism (a busted flush, apparently); his own perceived lack of moral fibre gives us an excessively admirable Nelson as a contrast; his physical self-absorption references the late John Diamond's public dying; and his present homelessness (though is possession of an office to be entirely homeless?) instigates a description of John Cheever's 1964 short story, "The Swimmer". He tells us what Archimedes did and why Amundsen beat Scott to the Antarctic. The book is meant to be an interior cri de coeur, but it reads like old hat, and clumsily confected old hat at that. Mark Steel is more a stand-up comedian than a writer. His book shouts, rather as he does, and depends too heavily on the absurd exemplar and over-logical conclusion to make his point. "It's as if. . .", "I wondered if. . .", "Maybe when. . ." is how he repeatedly brings out the underlying ridiculousness of a situation. It's a bit clunky, and it feels as if the need to make a joke overrides the more difficult simplicity of just being funny. But he presents the relation between his problems and those of the world in a sharper, less wallowing perspective than Leith. He too is appalled to be confused at 40, but in addition to the failure of his marriage, his political certainties have fallen apart. Steel situates his personal angst beneath the civic confusion of the mass of disgruntled voters who have discovered that they're helpless to change anything. A million people marched against the war in Iraq and no one took any notice. The gap between rich and poor has grown enormously under New Labour. Blair's and now Brown's party is obsessed with wealth and turning a profit. Steel and the rest of us are baffled. As a paid-up member of the Socialist Workers party and Respect, he used not to be baffled - at least he was part of a group with shared convictions. The radical left was even starting to pick up some of those disgruntled voters. Then George Galloway pussy-catted on Big Brother, and Tommy Sheridan sued the papers about alleged visits to a swingers' club - and the left in England and Scotland became a joke. At least in other parts of the world, Steel moans, the left "comes to grief because they're shot, imprisoned or exiled". He can no longer avoid the fact that the left is in denial. When Steel doubts the SWP claim that the party has 10,000 members, he's told: "We have to redefine the definition of member." Time to cancel the subs. Time, too, to recognise that his bad marriage can no longer be sustained. Unlike Leith, Steel does some serious rethinking, and does not just suffer loss. He wonders, against his former SWP judgment, if small-scale, personal dissent against the local McDonald's or Tesco doesn't have more effect than he'd thought. If the organisation and networks of the old left were grafted on to the new popular forms of opposition, there might still be hope for a new socialism in which the young can participate. Both men are writing in and of their late 40s, complaining about finding themselves stuck in the human condition, suddenly aware that, quite possibly, there's less time to come than there has been already. For my money, Mark Steel whines better. It used to be that men went all weak-kneed and mortality-conscious in their 30s, but it takes longer to grow up these days. Just imagine how those of us in our 60s are feeling, and man up, guys. ·

 Jenny Diski's new book Apology for the Woman Writing will be published by Virago in November

Heston Blumenthal & elBulli Review. Sunday Times October 2008

The Sunday Times review by Jenny Diski

Credit Crunch is not yet available on the menus of elBulli or The Fat Duck restaurants; it's still only what's happening to the economy as these two books are published. Who could have foreseen it? Still, on a morning when local authorities had announced a loss of £42m, all 5.44kg of The Big Fat Duck Cook Book arrived, looking a little like a regatta with gaily coloured satin ribbon place-holders, silvered paper edges, silver-embossed feathers and duck feet on the black cloth cover and outer slipcase, and measuring 30 x 35 x 6cm thick. Just bad timing. Or good timing for any financier or pensioner planning to drown their sorrows with a plate of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, which is served with a gold-leaf-covered langoustine bouillon cube in a teapot for you to dissolve yourself with some frankincense hydrosol, and pour over sea-urchins' tongues. The book costs £100 - four-fifths of the cost of the tasting menu at The Fat Duck in Bray, itself a mere bagatelle compared to what the government is paying out to salvage capitalism.

Practically speaking, you'd be better off spending the extra £25 waiting two months for a table and heading off to Bray so they can make it for you. Hydrosols are the least of it. Molecular gastronomy is not a description that Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria at elBulli near Barcelona like any more (too boffinish, not arty enough), but whatever you call their cooking, the equipment, let alone the gold-leaf, requirements are daunting. “Spread out 60 Petri dishes, add the glycerine and gelatine and set aside until fully softened.” It's not impossible that you might have 60 Petri dishes - I've got hundreds somewhere behind my shoes in the back of a cupboard. But the setting aside? Set them aside where? Front hall, up the stairs? The kitchen work surfaces are all taken up with the dry ice, the centrifuge, overhead stirrer, pacojet, rotary evaporater, and vacuum chambers (“the use of vacuum chambers is essential to a number of techniques at The Fat Duck”). No room for Petri dishes. “The technical level of elBulli's recipes requires specialist equipment, exact measurements using the metric system and professional experience to achieve good results,” it warns at the beginning of the recipe section of A Day at elBulli.

In fact, neither of these books is designed to lie open by your chopping board while you run a truffle-oily finger down the ingredients list. They are showing off expertise and innovation. Moody photos of the chefs jostle with abstract art shots of the food, and elBulli includes a layout of the route that patrons take to pay homage to Adria in the kitchen before the meal - almost as thrilling as the two-page spread of the opening of the car park at the start of the evening. A kind of stations of the knife and fork.

Blumenthal's book might be the more vulgar of the two books as an object, but he is endearing. His virginal enthusiasm nearly redeems the overextended 125-page history of his life in cooking. His description of the development of ideas for his recipes and the trial-and-error experiments excuse the pages of detailed, impossibly difficult recipes that follow. You can even almost overlook the paragraph, in the science section, headed The Histological Structure of Foie Gras, which is nowhere complemented by another paragraph discussing The Moral Structure of Force-Feeding Geese So Their Livers Swell to Diseased Proportions. And the science section is really interesting, with articles by academics about the brain, the nature of taste and why we like what we like. It's good to know that diners found Crab Ice Cream much sweeter than the identical Frozen Crab Bisque, and that spearmint and caraway are chemical twins but molecular mirror images of each other. Left-hand spearmint, right-hand caraway. If only the book weren't so heavy.

Actually, Blumenthal is often closer to kitsch than to science. The Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh dish was originally preceded by Babe in the Manger: a communion wafer infused with the smell of baby - a scent specially created by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel (talc and faeces?). Also on the menu is an edible rose bush. Flaming sherbet fountains and beetroot/grapefruit lollies move the kitsch towards nursery nostalgia. Bacon-and-egg ice cream is now practically a cliché, and the dish Sound of the Sea is brought to your table with a conch shell from which headphones emerge to play waves and gulls in your ears, as a fan “smeared with sea odour” wafts the scent of the seaside directly to your nose. It's no surprise that Blumenthal had a magician teach his waiters how to perform sleight-of-hand tricks while serving. It's really a children's party.

A Day at elBulli, though, is not endearing in the slightest. It insists excruciatingly on the creativity and art of the chef who secludes himself every morning in a secret hideaway for “creative sessions”. I've never heard any real artist use the word “creative” about himself, but this drips with it. If you're one of the chosen 8,000 out of the 2m petitioners a year who get to have dinner (no choice, just the tasting menu) you will, apparently experience the “rhythm of the spectacle”. The dishes transgress, play, provoke and are ironic, but require “the sixth sense” of the good diner to get the “knowing wink”. Some dishes need the right weather: only when the dry north wind of the Tramontana is blowing over the mountains is it possible to make Pineapple Paper with Parmesan. Indeed, it isn't really food, it's an entire discourse. “Inventing a new language is a sign of creativity”, and they're not just inventing it, they're “making the language better”. You might want to experience Art in 4 Acts instead of supper, with instructions from the waiters on how to eat the food, and in what order each mouthful should be taken, but I'd rather have cheese on toast - the regular kind, not the spherication, molecular taste-hit cheese-on-toast benzaldehyde balanced on a bed of foaming cuckoo spit.