"Down with Love"

I love this picture! From the latest "grouchy valentine" issue of washington post book world titled "down with love." The first book review (or at least the book being reviewed) seems more like a case of sour grapes ("Love good, Sex bad!").

It seems strange to have to state the obvious all over again: Both males and females should work hard to gain another's affection and trust. And one's sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself. Tell girls that it is such a commodity (as they were told for a number of decades), and they will rebel. The author is conflating what the girls refuse to conflate: love and sexuality. Sometimes they coexist, sometimes not. Loving, faithful marriages in which the sex life has cooled are as much a testament to that fact as a lustful tryst that leads nowhere.

Another one about women having mediocre sex lives and what should be done about it...

Maybe you're tired. Or you just don't feel like it. Perhaps it's your lover's fault; he doesn't know what you like. Or there's no time, the kids take all your attention, your job drains the life out of you. Or the dishes need to be done, the laundry has to be folded, and your body is not what it used to be. Or maybe you've never understood what all the fuss is about. It's easy to find reasons not to have sex.

Just in case the psychology claptrap is boring, here's an old column by Michael Dirda, Book World's editor, on the history and representation of love in French Literature... Also in the latest issue Dirda reviews a book about the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such a shame, Wordsworth's philosophy and romanticism looks so out of place in our world. almost a cliche...

I am reading about Love too (and I am not grumpy or grouchy at all!). The Man Without Qualities isn't a very romantic book (Musil basically says that there is a big gaping hole where we thought we had a "soul"). Though it has some great passages about love, written in a very peculiar and ironic style, like this one:

Neither Diotima not Arhnheim had ever loved. [...]This shrewd man, although imbued with experience of life, was still untouched and in danger of being parmanently alone when he met Diotima, whom destiny had destined for him. The mysterious forces within them converged. It could be compared only with the movement of the trade winds, the Gulf Stream, the volcanic tremors of the earth's crust; forces vastly superior to those of man, akin to the stars, were set in motion from one to the other, overriding such barriers as hours and days, measureless currents. At such moments the actual words spoken are supremely unimportant. Rising from the vertical creases of his trousers, Arnheim's body seemed to stand there in the godlike solitude of a towering mountain. United with him through the valley between them, Diotima rose on its other side, luminous with solitude, in her fashionable dress of the period with its puffed sleeves on the upper arms, the artful pleats over the bosom widening over the stomach, the skirt narrowing again below the knees to cling to her calves. The glass-bead curtains at the doors cast moving reflections like ponds, the javelins and arrows on the walls trembled with their feathered and deadly passions, and the yellow volumes of Calman-Levy on the tables were as silent as lemon groves. We will reverently pass over the first words spoken.