But Enough About You

Essays

Christopher Buckley

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476749532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

An extraordinary wide-ranging collection of essays with "distinctive wordplay and quirky opinions…Christopher Buckley is good company whether you're looking for two quick pages and a smile, or want to linger" ( The New York Times Book Review ). Christopher Buckley, like his terrific volume But Enough About You, contains multitudes. Tackling subjects ranging from "How to Teach Your Four-Year-Old to Ski" to "A Short History of the Bug Zapper, " and "The Art of Sacking" to literary friendships with Joseph Heller and Christopher Hitchens, he is at once a humorous storyteller, astute cultural critic, adventurous traveler, and irreverent historian.Reading these essays is the equivalent of being in the company of a tremendously witty and enlightening companion. Praised as "both deeply informed and deeply funny" by The Wall Street Journal, Buckley will have you laughing and reflecting in equal measure. This is a rare combination of big ideas and truly fun writing.

Criticism

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People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

—ATTRIBUTED TO A BOOK REVIEW WRITTEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN

FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMEN CAN’T BE WRONG

As Philip Larkin so indelibly put it,

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)—

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

But things didn’t really get going until 1972, when Dr. Alex Comfort published his groundbreaking and indeed earth-moving Joy of Sex. Since then it has sold in all its various editions eight million copies. If you were born after 1972, you may owe your very existence to Comfort. Now, on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, it has been revised and reissued by Comfort’s son, Nicholas, and lavishly—lasciviously—reillustrated.

A lot has happened sexwise since 1972: Roe v. Wade; the herpes epidemic; AIDS; Attorney General Edwin Meese’s doomed Commission on Pornography; ubiquitous breast implants; the rise and fall of Penthouse magazine; X-rated videos; triple-X-rated videos; Larry Flynt; the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue industry; Victoria’s Secret; cyberporn; Boogie Nights; RU-486; Wilt Chamberlain’s 20,000th conquest; Courtney Love and her band, Hole; the Wonderbra; Monica and Bill; Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche; Viagra; Maxim; Manolo Blahnik; the Anna Nicole Smith television show. It would appear that more people are having sex than ever before.

Whether “joy” has increased apace amid all this furious exertion is debatable, but anyone seeking either initiation or a refresher course on ars amatoria could do worse than to peruse these mauve, titillating pages. There are some delicious giggles to be had along the way. If these are not necessarily intentional, they are no less enjoyable.

The young man featured in the illustrations in the 1972 ur-text has evolved. He is no longer hirsute and missing only a peace symbol, looking as if his day job were playing bongos with the Lovin’ Spoonful. His partner in bliss is a comely raven-haired lady who just can’t seem to stop smiling, and little wonder, though she’s surely going to have a crick in her neck after all this.

In this 2002 edition, the emphasis on hair is—I’ll just quote Comfort, whose name remains on this book’s title page despite his son’s revisions: “Many women shave their armpit hair, conditioned as they are by the idea that hairlessness is sexy. Opinions are divided on this one—fashion dictates armpits should be bare, but in my opinion shaving is simply ignorant vandalism.” This aperçu will surely stimulate lively dinner party conversation in the months ahead.

Comfort gets quite passionate on the general subject of the armpit. Under the heading “Armpit” we find: “Classical site for kisses. Should on no account be shaved (see Cassolette). Can be used instead of the palm to silence your partner at climax.” I know you’re in a hurry to find out about cassolette, but please first note that “if you use your palm, rub it over your own and your partner’s armpit area first.” At points as these, the text seems to intersect with the script of the movie A Fish Called Wanda, in which Otto, the mad ex-C.I.A. assassin played to hambone perfection by Kevin Kline, takes a deep snort of his own armpits before leaping onto Jamie Lee Curtis.

Cassolette is—well, it’s right there on page 33 and I think I’ll just let you look it up. The book teems with French words, and why not, French being the lingua franca of love. Until now I had thought cassolette involved rabbit and white beans. Some of the terms are quite recherché, but I yearn to conjugate them, conjugally. There is, for instance, pattes d’araignée, literally “spider’s legs,” and it does sound like fun. On page 101: “The round-and-round and cinder-sifting motions of the woman’s hips—what the French call the Lyon mail-coach (la diligence de Lyon)—come easily with practice if you’ve got the right personality.” The word postillionage was also new to this reviewer, and you’re going to have to look that one up for yourselves, too. The section on la petite mort—“the little death”—is an alarming prospect and basis for an entire Woody Allen movie. And the word for one particular position is négresse. No comment.

The other foreign terms here serve to validate French’s claim to be the proper vocabulary of love. Take saxonus, a word for—never you mind. German may be the language of philosophy, but it is not the vernacular of the pillow. Shall we do the coitus saxonus, Liebchen?

Were you aware of srpski jeb? That is, we are told, “Serbian intercourse” or “mock rape.” Not tonight, Slobodan, I have a headache. Or hrvatski jeb? Croatian intercourse, “reputed by local wiseacres to be ‘exhausting.’ ” I’ll bet, what with all those NATO jets whooshing by overhead.

The Chinese have, as does their cuisine, delicious names for such positions as Wailing Monkey Clasping a Tree and Wild Geese Flying on Their Backs. I’ll have both, please, and the hot-and-sour soup. But there are English terms here, too, such as Viennese Oyster, defined as “a woman who can cross her feet behind her head, lying on her back, of course.” (Love the “of course.”) And it is nice to hear a few good words on behalf of the old missionary position: “Name given by amused Polynesians, who preferred squatting intercourse, to the European matrimonial. Libel on one of the most rewarding sex positions.”

Italian terms pop up here and there, but in the end it’s basically a Larousse Érotique. There’s flanquette, cuissade, croupade, ligottage, poire—not your grandfather’s pear, either—and you’ll very definitely want to know the meaning of pompoir, “the most sought-after feminine sexual response of all.” The nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, the Ernest Shackleton of sex, wrote that if a woman can perform this technique, ‘‘her husband will then value her above all women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful queen in the Three Worlds.” Or as Cosmopolitan magazine would put it: ONE SEX TRICK THAT WORKS!

There are pages and pages of cautionary notes about AIDS. (Casual sex was sooo ’70s.) Some critics have taken Comfort to task for urging complete abstinence in the matter of using an orifice not specifically designed by nature for purposes to which it is sometimes put in, say, English public schools. Also, he notes that spermicide can sometimes increase the chance of transmitting HIV. There’s a useful-sounding section on something called “hair-trigger trouble,” otherwise known as premature ejaculation, that income stream of a thousand sex clinics. And gentlemen are enjoined from blowing air into a certain part of madam, since this can be extremely injurious, to say nothing of embarrassing to explain at four a.m. in the emergency room. Meanwhile, Spanish fly can be as poisonous “as mustard gas.”

This is a manual, as it were, and manuals must employ the language of precision. Occasionally, however, you wonder if you’ve wandered into a game of Twister refereed by Casanova and the entire Académie Française, with video conferencing by the Marquis de Sade. If you thought the section on “frontal” would be fairly straightforward, parse this: “To unscramble a complicated posture for purposes of classification, turn the partners round mentally and see if they can finish up face-to-face in a matrimonial without crossing legs. If so, it’s frontal. If not, and they finish face-to-face astride one leg, it’s a flanquette; square from behind (croupade); or from behind, astride a leg (cuissade). It’s as simple as that.” What could be simpler? Honey, what are you doing on the floor?

Dr. Comfort died in 2000, having done more than most for the general pursuit of happiness. He was not a proselytizer, like those tiresome Esalen types who were always urging us to do it in the road. The phrase “free love” is mercifully absent. On the other hand, he didn’t see anything wrong with voyeurism or group sex. In fact, he quite enjoyed both, and the evidence suggests that he did enough research for a second Ph.D. But he doesn’t make you feel like a dweeb (or dweebette) if your idea of fun doesn’t include croupade and flanquette with the entire neighborhood block association. On the whole, the tone is warm, learned, and friendly, as if Marcus Welby, M.D., had disappeared to California for a few months and come back with a great big grin on his face and some nifty new ideas on stress reduction. The occasional refusal to admit irony—as when he advises wearing a hard hat during motorcycle sex—will cause guffaws, but that only shows, once again, the impotence of being earnest.

—The New York Times, January 2003

KISSINGER ON CHINA

Ah, warm and fuzzy China. Torturing and jailing dissidents, hacking into Gmail, cozying up to the worst regimes on earth, refusing to float the renminbi, spewing fluorocarbons into the ozone, building up its navy, and stealing military secrets—all while enabling America’s fiscal incontinence by buying all our T-bills. The $1.1 trillion question at the start of what’s been called “The Chinese Century” is simple: Friend or enemy? Frenemy?

While Henry Kissinger doesn’t quote Mario Puzo, Don Corleone’s maxim, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer,” echoes throughout his grand, sweeping tutorial, On China. Kissinger has been the go-to China wise man since his first secret meeting there in 1971. In the intervening decades, he’s made fifty-odd trips back, often carrying critical messages between leaders, defusing crises, or pleading with each side to understand the other’s position. His perennial ambassadorship-at-large puts readers right in the room with Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao.

It also overflows with a lifetime of privileged observations. Here’s a great one: Why did China invade Vietnam in 1979? To “teach it a lesson,” Kissinger writes, for its border clashes with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. But when the Soviet Union failed to come to Vietnam’s aid, China concluded it had “touched the Tiger’s buttocks” with impunity. “In retrospect,” Kissinger explains, “Moscow’s relative passivity . . . can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviets’ decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese.” As such, Kissinger concludes, the 1979 clash “can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time.” Of course. Just the proverbial game of dominoes—with the pieces very widely separated. As for the psychology behind China’s extraordinary death toll in Vietnam, more on that in a minute.

While Kissinger can sometimes appear to be an apologist for—or explainer-away of—Chinese unwarm and unfuzzy behavior, he demonstrates a profound understanding of the impulses behind that behavior. And those impulses, he believes, go back many thousands of years. During a meeting in the 1990s, then President Jiang Zemin wryly remarked to Kissinger that seventy-eight generations had elapsed since Confucius died in 449 B.C. By my count, we in the United States have seen eight generations since the Declaration of Independence. Rather puts things in perspective.

According to Kissinger there are four key elements to understanding the Chinese mind: Confucianism (“a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion”); Sun Tzu (outsmarting: good; direct conflict: bad); an ancient board game called wei qi (which stresses “the protracted campaign”); and China’s “century of humiliation” in the 1800s (karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, you Imperialists?). Actually, make that five: Wei Yuan—a nineteenth-century mid-ranking Confucian mandarin—developed the Chinese concept of “barbarian management,” which was at the core of Mao’s diplomacy with the United States and the Soviet Union. How one wishes China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would change its name to Office of Barbarian Management.

No, sorry, make that six: overwhelming fear of internal disorder or chaos. The resulting gestalt is an absolute imperviousness to foreign pressure. Kissinger recounts a chilly moment when, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng tells him that overreaction by the United States “could even lead to war.” He meant it. Even more chilling were Mao’s repeated, almost gleeful, musings about the prospect of nuclear war. “If the imperialists unleash war on us,” Kissinger recalls him saying, “we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” Those grim and quite believable words sound as though they came from the last scene of Dr. Strangelove. But Kissinger reminds us that during the first Taiwan Strait confrontation in 1955, it was the United States that threatened to use nukes.

Several other episodes since have combined—rightly or wrongly, as Kissinger might put it—to turn Chinese popular opinion against America: Tiananmen Square; the accidental 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; and the Hainan incident in 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane and precipitated George W. Bush’s first foreign-policy crisis. Then there are more recent, obvious events, such as the collapse of the American and European financial markets in 2007 and 2008, which stripped much of the luster from our image as the global economic leader. That latter year, as the world’s Olympic athletes gathered in Beijing for a proxy celebration of China’s arrival on the world stage, Washington was busy coping with a distressed Wall Street, two quagmire wars, and three ailing auto companies.

Is Kissinger optimistic about future relations between the United States and China? In a word, yes and no. No, because of a disturbing, emergent “martial spirit” that envisions conflict with the United States as an inevitable consequence of China’s rise—much as the Kaiser’s naval buildup led to World War I. In this Chinese view, the United States is not so much Mao’s famous “paper tiger” but “an old cucumber painted green.” In retrospect, I think I preferred it when we were a paper tiger.

On a more upbeat note, Kissinger explains that despite its unprecedented economic ascendance, China has one or two problems of its own. Its economy has to grow annually by 7 percent—a goal that would leave any Western industrialized nation gasping—or face the dreaded internal unrest. Corruption, meanwhile, is deeply embedded in the economic culture. “It is one of history’s ironies,” he writes, “that Communism, advertised as bringing a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.” Then there is China’s rapidly aging population, which may dwarf our own impending Social Security crisis.

Yet the Chinese may be better equipped, psychologically and philosophically, to withstand the coming shocks than the rest of us. A country tha...