Culture and Swearing

What with our impenetrable anonymity (see the final photo featured in the Marilyn’s first ever post: as I say, impenetrable), the following might surprise you. But we get asked all the time – literally all the goddam time – what ‘Culture and Swearing’, our subtitle, our tagline, our afterthought, our surname actually, y’know, means like. Is it mere pithily expressed provocativeness? Does it attempt to bridge a mutually exclusive binary? Is culture ordinary? Is swearing extraordinary? And so on.

And so forth.

Now, to answer such questions explicitly would be to miss the point rather – such coarse and unelaborate behaviour is the preserve of, I don’t know, fags obsessed with ‘books’ and ‘polemic’, fucking Welshmen like Raymond Williams, those sort of fags. We, on the other hand, concern ourselves with the elegant and the epigrammatical, responses that offer you, the reader, an opportunity to formulate meanings of your own within a broad intellectual framework constructed and, compassionately of course, policed by us, the fathers of your children, the masters of your literary wombs. So for the first in what may or may not become a regular feature, let us answer the question in a manner entirely our own:

What is ‘Culture and Swearing’?

‘Culture and Swearing’ is George Bataille’s Story of the Eye.

Aha! George Bataille – a fictional figure conceived by moderately successful willy-exposing weirdos Of Montreal as a means to facilitating easier rhyming within their twelve-minutes-long so-long-it’s-inevitably-regarded-as-a-masterpiece-masterpiece, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ (a hilariously weak acoustic version can be found here), I hear you cry. “I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met / Who could appreciate George Bataille / Standing at a Swedish festival – discussing Story of the Eye.” I see the culture – but where’s the swearing?

Oho, just you wait fucko. First, though, a bio (thank you Penguin Modern Classics – you didn’t actually think Of Montreal invented him did you? Have you any idea how ridiculous that thought of yours actually was? I hate you): "George Bataille, French essayist and novelist, was born in 1897. He was converted to Catholicism, then to Marxism and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism. As curator of the municipal library in Orleans, he led a relatively simple life, although he became involved, usually on the fringes, with the Surrealist movement. He founded the literary review Critique in 1946, which he edited until his death in 1962, and was also founder of the review Documents, which published many of the leading surrealist writers."

He led a relatively simple life? YOU DEGODDAMCIDE::::::::::

Passage the first – bottom of page 12 in the Modern Classics edition:

"Meanwhile, the sky had turned quite thundery, and, with nightfall, huge raindrops began plopping down, bringing relief from the harshness of the torrid, airless day. The sea was loudly raging, outroared by long rumbles of thunder, while flashes of lightning, bright as day, kept brusquely revealing the two pleasured cunts of the now silent girls. A brutal frenzy drove our three bodies. Two young mouths fought over my arse, my balls, and my cock, but I still kept pushing apart female legs wet with saliva and come, splaying them as if writhing out of a monster’s grip, and yet the monster was nothing but the utter violence of my movements. The hot rain was finally pouring down and streaming over fully exposed bodies. Huge booms of thunder shook us, heightening our fury, wresting forth our cries of rage, which each flash accompanied with a glimpse of our sexual parts. Simone had found a mud puddle, and was smearing herself wildly: she was jerking off with the earth and coming violently, whipped by the downpour, my head locked in her soil-covered legs, her face wallowing in the puddle, where she was brutally churning Marcelle’s cunt, one arm around Marcelle’s hips, the hand yanking the thigh, forcing it open."

Passage the second – top of page 17:

"She wanted to toss off in the wardrobe and was pleading to be left in peace.

"I ought to say that we were all very drunk and completely bowled over by what was going on. The naked boy was being sucked by a girl. Simone, standing with her dress tucked up, was rubbing her bare cunt against the wardrobe, in which a girl was audibly masturbating with brutal gasps. And all at once, something incredible happened, a strange swish of water, followed by a trickle and a stream from under the wardrobe door: poor Marcelle was pissing in her wardrobe while masturbating. But the explosion of drunken guffaws that ensued rapidly degenerated into a debauch of tumbling bodies, lofty legs and arses, wet skirts and come. Guffaws emerged like foolish and involuntary hiccups but scarcely managed to interrupt a brutal onslaught on cunts and cocks…I was pale, smeared with blood, my clothes askew. During the orgy, splinters of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us. A young girl was throwing up…The resulting smell stench of blood, sperm, urine and vomit made me almost recoil in terror."

Thank you to Joachim Neugroschal, translator. Next week, The Marquis, John Rochester or the fuck scene from Season 1 of the Wire.