[Mb-civic] SCOOTER'S SEX SHOCKER

[Jef Bek]

I heard about on Air America/Randi Rhodes tonight:

These "Family Values" Neo-Cons are much sicker than we thought!

³At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple
with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with
their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a
stick when it seemed to lose interest.²
- Except from THE APPRENTICE, by I. Lewis ³Scooter² Libby

As if treason and warmongering weren¹t enough, Scooter¹s indictments have
stirred interest in some of his other accomplishments.  And yes, his novel
is yet another tome packed with that famous family-values proseŠpedophilia,
bestiality, incest, prostitution, homoeroticism, etc.


http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/051107ta_talk_collins

THE NEW YORKER
THE TALK OF THE TOWN


CLOSE READING DEPT.
SCOOTER¹S SEX SHOCKER
by Lauren Collins
Lauren Collins on Libby¹s lurid novel.
Issue of 2005-11-07
Posted 2005-10-31




Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie
Plame affair, the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter
Libby, Dick Cheney¹s recently deposed chief of staff. ³Out West, where you
vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because
their roots connect them. Come back to work‹and life,² he wrote in a
jailhouse note to Judith Miller. Meant as a waiver of confidentiality, the
letter touched off the sort of fevered exegesis more often associated with
readings of ³The Waste Land² than of legal correspondence. For even more
difficult prose, however, one must revisit an earlier work. ³The
Apprentice²‹Libby¹s 1996 entry in the long and distinguished annals of the
right-wing dirty novel‹tells the tale of Setsuo, a courageous virgin
innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and war.

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As
an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire (³[She] finally
came to him in the bed and shouted ŒArragghrrorwr!¹ in his ear, bit his
neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him²) to Buckley (³I¹d
rather do this with you than play cards²) to Liddy (³T¹sa Li froze, her lips
still enclosing Rand¹s glans . . .²) to Ehrlichman (³ ŒIt felt like a little
tongue¹ ²) to O¹Reilly (³Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants²),
extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that
might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne
Cheney¹s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while
having sex with his mistress.

It took Libby more than twenty years to write ³The Apprentice,² which is set
in a remote Japanese province in the winter of 1903. The book is brimming
with quasi-political intrigue and antique locutions‹³The girl who wore the
cloak of yellow fur²; ³one wore backward a European hat²‹that make the
phrase a ³former Hill staffer,² by comparison, seem straightforward.

Like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The
narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath,
torture, urine, ³turds,² armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus,
boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, ³At length he
walked around to the deer¹s head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for
a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in
front of the deer¹s nostrils.²

Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character,
Yukiko, draws hair on the ³mound² of a little girl. The brothers of a dead
samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair,
evergreens), quiver (a ³pink underlip,² arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed
(floorboards, sheets, fingers). The cast includes a dwarf, and an ³assistant
headman² who comes to restore order after a crime at the inn. (Might this
character be autobiographical? And, if so, would that have made Libby the
assistant headman or the assistant headman¹s assistant?)

When it comes to depicting scenes of romance, however, Libby can evoke a
sort of musty sweetness; while one critic deemed ³The Apprentice²
³reminiscent of Rembrandt,² certain passages can better be described as
reminiscent of Penthouse Forum. There is, for example, Yukiko¹s seduction of
the inexperienced apprentice:

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower
still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against
his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one
might be larger. . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near
his face and he knew not how best to touch her.


Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors
can seem embarrassingly awkward‹the written equivalent of trying to cop a
feel while pinning on a corsage‹Libby is unabashed:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple
with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with
their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a
stick when it seemed to lose interest.


And, finally:

He asked if they should fuck the deer.


The answer, reader, is yes.

So, how does Libby stack up against the competition? This question was put
to Nancy Sladek, the editor of Britain¹s Literary Review, which, each year,
holds a contest for bad sex writing in fiction. (In 1998, someone nominated
the Starr Report.) Sladek agreed to review a few passages from Libby.
³That¹s a bit depraved, isn¹t it, this kind of thing about bears and young
girls? That¹s particularly nasty, and the other ones are just boring,² she
said. ³God, they¹re an odd bunch, these Republicans.² Unlike their American
counterparts, she said, Tories haven¹t taken much to sex writing. ³They
usually just get caught,² she said.