Pig of the week

Monstrous pig

With thanks to Niall.

Pig of the week

Khanzir, the only known pig in Afghanistan. Via The Guardian.

Pig of the week (sort of)

Pig of the week comes as a book review this week. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes, translated into English as Pig Tales, is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

The heroine-narrator has a dubious job working for a perfume company, where she has sex with clients in the guise of selling them expensive perfumes. As she begins to put on weight, she notices her popularity rising with her clients: they love her ‘healthy’ look and rosy pink skin. Meanwhile our heroine finds she can no longer stand the taste of ham sandwiches but finds herself craving raw potatoes. She is turning slowly into a pig. Gradually this dawns on her – she starts to prefer being on all fours to walking upright, instead of having a human menstrual cycle she has periods of being in heat, and she starts to grow bristles on her back and extra nipples.

At the same time the political situation in France becomes increasingly crazy, a spiritual-fascistic dictator takes power and adopts the narrator as the face of his campaign: ‘Pour un monde plus sain!’ His drastic measures to clean Paris of the ‘unhealthy’ result in him losing interest in our heroine who finds herself living in the sewers, where she gives birth to a litter of dead piglets.

She is stil in a state of flux, switching between human and sow, when she meets a werewolf with whom she finds, temporarily, happiness: they shack up together in connubial bliss, surviving on takeaway pizza – she eats the pizza and he the delivery boy. Eventually the situation becomes unworkable as his wolfish needs overcome his love for his companion. The sow escapes to her mother’s home in the countryside where she gives in to her piggish side, finding peace in the woodlands eating acorns and making friends with ‘un sanglier très beau et très viril’.

Truismes is wonderful as a satirical take on our ideas of nature, femininity, bestiality (in the sense of becoming a beast) and sex. The passages about the erotics of the pig are brilliant: the way men go crazy for the piggy fatness and pinkness is very funny and good. ‘Dans les miroirs je me trouvais belle, un peu rouge certes, un peu boudinée, mais sauvage, je ne sais pas comment dire. Il y avait comme de la fierté dans mes yeux et dans mon corps. Quand je me relevais le client avait lui aussi les yeux tout dénoués. On se serait cru dans le jungle.’

The contrast between the tolerant, matter-of-fact tone of the narrator and the crazy turmoil both within her own body and in the world around her gives the novel its bizarre edge: although she’s appalled by the changes to her own body, she embraces the pleasures of her animal side. By comparison her life as a woman is grotesquely sordid – she is, in fact, treated like an animal by almost everyone she comes into contact with. The writing about her moments as a pig is wonderfully evocative: the damp, woodlandy smells of the country, heightened by her pig senses, and the satisfaction of living off roots and acorns are positively enticing. In becoming a pig she finds more identity than she ever had as a woman in a society which dehumanises its own.

Sexy chick

This is a postcard I found on my holiday this year. I felt it deserved a wider audience. Comments about consumerisation of sexuality and sexualisation of food on, er, a postcard please.

Entre la plus lointaine étoile et nous

Entre la plus lointaine étoile et nous
la distance, inimaginable, reste encore
comme une ligne, un lien, comme un chemin.
S’il est un lieu hors de toute distance,
ce devait être là qu’il se perdait:
non pas plus loin de toute étoile, ni moins loin,
mais déjà presque dans un autre espace,
en dehors, entraîné hors des mesures.
Notre mètre, de lui à nous, n’avait plus cours:
autant, comme une lame, le briser sur le genou.

– Philippe Jaccottet

Some more comment on the CWU strike

Seumas Milne in the Guardian:

…the clearest sign of who is behind the breakdown is the fact that while the CWU has been offering to go to the conciliation service Acas for talks without preconditions, the company – backed by the government – has refused to do so unless the stoppages are called off, while ostentatiously recruiting 30,000 casual workers to cut the ground from beneath its staff.

Against that background, it’s hardly surprising that the postal workers’ leader, Billy Hayes, concludes: “They’re trying to break the power of the union and its influence in the workplace.” If that’s the case, there will be months of disruption and mayhem. This is an industry blighted by years of under-investment, threats of privatisation and a regulatory regime rigged in favour of private competitors. While it’s true that the internet (along with the recession) is cutting letter volumes, it’s also expanding the packages and parcels business as more people shop online.

Pig of the week

A very attractive saddleback.

Go the posties! or, why I am supporting the CWU strike

The posties are coming out on strike nationally tomorrow over pay, conditions and job security.

This is a really good diary piece in the LRB written by a postman, talking about a lot of the cutbacks and modernisations the postal service has undergone over the last few years.

People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.

According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more? How come I can work up to five hours at a stretch without time for a sit-down or a tea break? How come my knees nearly give way with the weight I have to carry? How come something snapped in my back as I was climbing out of the shower, so that I fell to the floor and had to take a week off work?

Kollontai – Love of worker bees

Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who wrote about the liberation of women and the need for any kind of socialist revolution to deal with the inequalities existing between men and women before it could be truly

Love of worker bees is her novel which expands on some of these ideas, being built on the conflict between a (common-law) husband and wife when the husband, Volodya, is still tied to bourgeois notions of marriage while his wife, Vasya, is convinced that the new politics of post-revolutionary Russia must be reflected in new social and personal relations. Volodya becomes a director of a large factory, and starts to expect Vasya to take on the bourgeois role of ‘director’s wife’ – to stay at home and keep the house nice (with the help of a servant), leaving behind her previous work in the Party, and the communal house she has devoted herself to organsing. She finds this constricting, and when her husband’s workers come to the house to complain about working conditions enthusiastically throws herself back into the role of Bolshevik trade unionist, helping them find ways to fight the boss.

Volodya sees this as a betrayal; but betrays Vasya in turn by keeping up an affair with a beautiful, non-political woman, Nina. Vasya, sincerely committed to a new politics of sexual engagement, is less troubled by the affair than by Volodya’s failure to tell her the truth about it. The psychological reality of the novel is in Vasya’s inability to make a clean break with Volodya: she is sensible enough to realise that the life he offers is not for her, but her passionate sexual desire for him makes her dither and delay, breaking things off only to be overwhelmed by his declarations of love; convincing herself again and again that he is not lying to her, that he has truly broken off his affair. But in the end her redemption is to walk away from her marriage to Volodya and return alone but pregnant to her communal house. Here she intends to make a life more in keeping with her communalist, progressive ideas:

‘But how are you going to raise a child all on your own?’ [asks her friend Grusha]

‘What do you mean, all on my own? Everything will be arranged perfectly, and we’ll set up a crêche. In fact I thought of asking you to help run the crêche. I know how you love children. And soon there’ll be a new baby, for all of us!’

‘A communist baby!’

‘Precisely so!’ They both laughed.

Sheila Rowbotham, who writes the afterword to my copy, suggests in Women, resistance and revolution that Love of worker bees fails to solve the problem it expresses so beautifully:

‘…Vasilisa’s choice simply ignores the basic causes of tension. She goes away and is able to rid herself of her jealousy of Nina and the traditional feminine […] She finds her identity thus only by denying the existence of the man and her own sexuality. The only solution possible is no real solution.’

But this is a misreading of the source of conflict: Vasya’s problem in Love of worker bees is not one of sexual jealousy of the other woman, but of separating her own desires and needs as an individual (for freedom, independence, her work, the ability to live how she likes) from her sexual desire for Volodya. Furthermore, Vasya doesn’t rule out sexuality forever: all she decides is that her passion for Volodya is spent, since they no longer share the friendship and trust she needs in a relationship.

Nonetheless it’s true that the ending with its sunny communist optimism is not as psychologically subtle as the depiction of Vasya’s struggle to detach herself from Volodya. But Kollontai’s ideas about the need for new forms of personal life to follow new political structures are important, and Love of worker bees expresses them beautifully.

A really interesting Marxist analysis of The wire at Jump Cut:

An unskilled and poorly educated underclass is trapped between the drug economy and the war on drugs. The Wire compresses decades of the Baltimore drug trade into its five seasons. In a sense, the way the series depicts the many facets of that trade functions to give us a master class in the history of the capitalist mode of production and accumulation. When Detective Jimmy McNulty observes, “Everything else in this country gets sold without people shooting each other behind it,” the irony is implicit. Within legitimate capitalism, the economic system’s violence remains largely hidden. Only in the primitive accumulation of the drug economy is violence shown as highly visible and an integral part of the trade.