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So there's a great used bookstore at Davis Square, McIntyre and Moore. I stopped in the other night and found this odd book, "Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932", a series of 12 roundtable discussions about sex by fairly major surrealist figures.

It's an interesting read (though they generally aren't sounding stereotypically "surreal") but a lot of it comes across like this:

RAYMOND QUENEAU   Péret?
BENJAMIN PÉRET   I always follow the woman's preference. I always ask what she prefers.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Queaneau?
RAYMOND QUENEAU   I agree with Péret.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Prévert?
JACQUES PRÉVERT   I share Breton's view.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Morise?
MAX MORISE   It is a matter of whatever is mutually agreeable.
BENJAMIN PÉRET   Unik?
PIERRE UNIK   Like Péret, I always ask the woman what she prefers.

I kept think of the Loony Tunes "Goofy Gophers"... "After you!" "No, after you!" "After you, I insist!" "Nononono, after you!"

Still, I ended up liking Man Ray even more than I did before, though he was only in one of the discussions:

ANDREÉ BRETON   Does the man have any comparable way of recognizing the woman's orgasm?
GEORGES SADOUL   No.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Man Ray?
MAN RAY   The woman is strongly aware of the precise moment of orgasm in the man. But the man has nothing to go on except for the woman's lassitude.
ANDREÉ BRETON   And if this lassitude is simulated?
MAN RAY   Too bad for the woman! I go along with her act.

But my favorite bit was the following exchange...

ANDREÉ BRETON   A fanciful question: Péret finds all the women with whom he has had sexual relations assembled together, in a café for example, with the one he loved or believed he loved standing apart. What would he do?
BENJAMIN PÉRET   Run for my life.

They seem kind of preoccupied about simultaneous orgasm. (Maybe because of the times they give for how long it takes once the preliminaries are done... "five minutes", "five minutes", "twenty seconds maximum" "Less than a minute", "Two minutes", and "between fifteen and forty seconds")

The other question that caught my attention was if they had had sex with a woman who had since died, and if that brought on pangs of remorse. As far as I know all my former lovers are still around, but it's an oddly disquieting thought.

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Article of the Moment
Could we have accidentally nuked Jupiter by letting the plutonium-packing Galileo satellite crash into its crushing depths? (Or as loquacious put it on metafilter, "All these worlds are yours, save Europa. Attempt no landings he...llo! What the hell is wrong with you!? Did you just nuke Jupiter?")

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Passing of the Moment
RIP Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Damn, but did he write some good stuff. "Cat's Cradle" with its pseudocult of Bokononism is something I could really get behind.

I think I need to reread his recent "Timequake".