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Lust & Philosophy
To track down Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his Beijing neighborhood, expat Isham Cook employs tips from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Simone Martini's painting of the Annunciation and Louis Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy. Meanwhile, Luna, a woman of flamboyant sexuality who invites her dinner guests into bed, assists Isham in the seduction of a third beauty of ambiguous Asiatic ethnicity, Adalat. But revelations from the philosopher of parody Jean Baudrillard begin to eat away at reality until Isham can no longer clearly distinguish Luna from Adalat or his own Caucasian identity from the Chinese.
A hypnotic journey of a novel, with idea bombs going off along the way, Lust & Philosophy is mind-rape as literature, a fairytale on acid, and a holographic Rorschach test all in one, and will appeal to fans of Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and other novelists of the uncanny. www.ishamcook.com
A hypnotic journey of a novel, with idea bombs going off along the way, Lust & Philosophy is mind-rape as literature, a fairytale on acid, and a holographic Rorschach test all in one, and will appeal to fans of Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and other novelists of the uncanny. www.ishamcook.com
230 pages, Paperback
First published September 16, 2012
3 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
Isham Cook
11 books43 followersAmerican essayist and novelist. His writing philosophy is big concept, discriminating, provocative. His influences are Ballard, Beckett, Borges, Dick, Kafka, Hesse, Melville, Mishima, Sade, and all uncompromising authors who bulldoze their way into new territory. Motto: The purpose of writing is to be volatile.
Kirkus Reviews calls his second novel The Kitchens of Canton "poignant...language barriers abound, with dialogue in Cantonese, Italian, and Latin, but Cook isn’t merely interested in verbal language—body language, customs and rituals, and symbols are also on full display. The book also explores Americans’ complicated relationship with sex, juxtaposing it against their seemingly comfortable relationships with weapons and violence. An insightful, unconventional, and risqué view of present-day culture."
His wide-ranging literary tastes mirror his equally eclectic musical tastes—classical (medieval through contemporary), jazz, rock, folk, world (Peking Opera, Balinese Gamelan, Indian ragas). He is a citizen of the world, having lived in the US, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, and (currently since the mid-90s) China, and traveled to many more. Websites:
IshamCook.com
Books2Read:
https://books2read.com/ap/8vq55j/Isha...
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/ent...
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/isham...
Kirkus Reviews calls his second novel The Kitchens of Canton "poignant...language barriers abound, with dialogue in Cantonese, Italian, and Latin, but Cook isn’t merely interested in verbal language—body language, customs and rituals, and symbols are also on full display. The book also explores Americans’ complicated relationship with sex, juxtaposing it against their seemingly comfortable relationships with weapons and violence. An insightful, unconventional, and risqué view of present-day culture."
His wide-ranging literary tastes mirror his equally eclectic musical tastes—classical (medieval through contemporary), jazz, rock, folk, world (Peking Opera, Balinese Gamelan, Indian ragas). He is a citizen of the world, having lived in the US, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, and (currently since the mid-90s) China, and traveled to many more. Websites:
IshamCook.com
Books2Read:
https://books2read.com/ap/8vq55j/Isha...
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/ent...
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/isham...
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 30, 2012
While the title is self-explanatory, the story is complex and mainly set in Beijing, but also in Chicago, Edmonton, Amsterdam, and parts of England and Germany.
It’s obvious from the beginning that the protagonist, also named Isham Cook, is anything but the stereotypical North American in China. Interspersed between Cook’s determination to meet a mysterious Chinese woman on his university campus, he delves into the second part of the book’s title: philosophy.
He discusses all types of literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the Marquis de Sade and Yukio Mishima. He flashes back–or is it forward?–to a love triangle with two Chinese women. Luna is Chinese but born and raised in Africa. As self-assured as we find the protagonist Cook, Luna is even more free-spririted. There are no boundaries for Luna. Adalat, her friend, on the other hand, is Uighur with more traditional mores.
Cook breaks for a backstory flashback about halfway into the novel. His troubled childhood is punctuated by a crazy stepfather, not unlike Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. Cook’s family moves to Germany for his stepfather’s sabbatical. Before the year is over, Joe the stepfather has kicked Cook out of their family, which sends the protagonist on a quest that lands him in Canada, and later Chicago.
As a Chicago native, I found his critique of the academic community to be spot on. At one point, Cook is in his favorite coffee shop, Intelligentsia, on the north side, and is amazed to see a professor walk in to the cafe and take a seat across from a homeless man. But as it turns out, the professor is so in his own world that he doesn’t realize his table companion is a bum. My father taught at DePaul, where the character Cook was an adjunct professor. The author Cook gets the environment there, but even better, the wackiness that is the University of Chicago (I worked there for a few years).
He returns to the Luna-Adalat-Cook relationship, including a climactic scene on a camping trip on the Great Wall. The almost-final scene, however, is amazing and brings together the different parts of the book in a Kafkan manner. At the end we learn more about the elusive woman on campus. Cook brilliantly brings that all together, too.
I couldn’t put this book down. The story never lulled, and the characters were all sympathetic, except for the stepfather, Joe. This book might not be for everyone, but if you can handle the two terms in the title, then I’d say go for it.
It’s obvious from the beginning that the protagonist, also named Isham Cook, is anything but the stereotypical North American in China. Interspersed between Cook’s determination to meet a mysterious Chinese woman on his university campus, he delves into the second part of the book’s title: philosophy.
He discusses all types of literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the Marquis de Sade and Yukio Mishima. He flashes back–or is it forward?–to a love triangle with two Chinese women. Luna is Chinese but born and raised in Africa. As self-assured as we find the protagonist Cook, Luna is even more free-spririted. There are no boundaries for Luna. Adalat, her friend, on the other hand, is Uighur with more traditional mores.
Cook breaks for a backstory flashback about halfway into the novel. His troubled childhood is punctuated by a crazy stepfather, not unlike Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. Cook’s family moves to Germany for his stepfather’s sabbatical. Before the year is over, Joe the stepfather has kicked Cook out of their family, which sends the protagonist on a quest that lands him in Canada, and later Chicago.
As a Chicago native, I found his critique of the academic community to be spot on. At one point, Cook is in his favorite coffee shop, Intelligentsia, on the north side, and is amazed to see a professor walk in to the cafe and take a seat across from a homeless man. But as it turns out, the professor is so in his own world that he doesn’t realize his table companion is a bum. My father taught at DePaul, where the character Cook was an adjunct professor. The author Cook gets the environment there, but even better, the wackiness that is the University of Chicago (I worked there for a few years).
He returns to the Luna-Adalat-Cook relationship, including a climactic scene on a camping trip on the Great Wall. The almost-final scene, however, is amazing and brings together the different parts of the book in a Kafkan manner. At the end we learn more about the elusive woman on campus. Cook brilliantly brings that all together, too.
I couldn’t put this book down. The story never lulled, and the characters were all sympathetic, except for the stepfather, Joe. This book might not be for everyone, but if you can handle the two terms in the title, then I’d say go for it.
May 8, 2023
This novel details the life of Isham Cook, pen name of an American writer who has lived in Beijing for many years. It isn’t a straightforward read; Lust and Philosophy follows Isham through a number of coming of age experiences in different countries and they’re not in chronological order. Those who like to be outraged will speculate which sexual encounters described are really autobiographical. But that would be missing the point, which is: sex is suppressed to a pathological degree, while other pleasures are restricted and demonised too. Isham’s retelling of Genesis in chapter 16, probably explains best what he is on about, how he would like to see things turned upside down:
“They made love. Adam had his first taste of pussy. Eve had her first orgasm. Up till that point it had merely relieved an itch, something they had scarcely been aware of doing, but now it clicked – how cool sex was. They realized as well how much time had been lost. Their anger grew as they understood their predicament, and the solution likewise became clear. Ialdabaoth was powerful only as long as he nourished himself on others’ ignorance and fear. But why run away from Eden only to let Ialdabaoth remain in control? That very night as he slept, Adam and Eve slit his throat. They stuffed his penis in his mouth, popped his testicles into his eye sockets and smoked his eyes.”
Another major theme is that we live in societies full of inexplicably obstructive rules and individuals. My favourite quote in the book is:
“Why is it people routinely excel at being stubborn and difficult while avoiding at all costs whatever is easy and wonderful?”
The narrative follows the whims and the wide-ranging interests of the erudite Isham; he finds links that leave mere mortals behind. The starting point is Isham’s spotting of an alluring Chinese woman he dubs Cookie on a Beijing street. Isham’s descriptions of Chinese streets aren’t plentiful in this work, but I appreciated what there was:
“A Japanese restaurant on the corner. Hair salons, massage parlors, donkey meat eateries, groceries, a popular Manchurian restaurant. A Hunan restaurant. A Xinjiang restaurant. More hair salons along the street’s darker western stretch before it linked back to Changwa Middle Road, these salons being of the shabbier variety, with handjob services. Another Japanese restaurant on the corner, a teahouse on the facing corner.”
He wants to approach Cookie and muses on the fraught undertaking that is addressing a stranger on the street. He is hopeful she’ll stop and he can achieve his goal of sexual conquest. On the other hand if she is on her way to work he might be ignored.
“But I cannot deny the deeply ingrained norms of behavior we are all burdened with: the same unconscious compulsion that makes us swivel around when the policeman hails us keeps us pointed straight ahead on our way to work.”
Before he could become Isham Cook the writer who works at a university in Beijing and pursues Chinese women, he had to throw off an oppressive superego that controlled him through fear rather than guilt. Freud thought the superego came from the father – a strict father could mean a rigid moral code – and great guilt resulted when it was (almost) inevitably transgressed. Society too functions like a superego telling the individual what to do. In the contract for being a member of a civilised society is a clause stating we need to sublimate much of our natural aggressive and sexual drives into work and art. Those who have difficulty with this (nearly everyone at some stage or another) will get into trouble and damage their standing. In chapter two we meet the nine-year-old Isham, and after an exposition on battleships, one of the least entertaining asides in the book, we learn that his divorced mother has married an ex Jesuit priest named Joe. Also in this chapter Isham is sexually abused at summer camp – his take on the incident is predictably different from what you might expect. Joe becomes the overbearing superego in Isham’s life:
“The harangues take place every three weeks or so, after a buildup of hostile silence. I never know what he is angry about until the harangue begins, but whatever it is, it always concerns the same petty infractions. They are permanently registered on a yellow pad of legal paper, the list filling up more and more of the pad over the years, so he can flip through the pages to remind me how many instances of the same infraction were previously committed, dates recorded in the margins. Nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven.”
Joe reminded me of Dwight, the evil stepfather in Tobias Wolff’s novel, This Boy’s Life. Dwight, an alcoholic like Joe, was well played by Robert De Niro in the movie. It’s a fair bet there won’t be a film version of Lust and Philosophy – a shame. While Joe is important, Isham’s mother is a complete non-entity in the novel.
I can imagine Cook writing a Swiftian satire where he travels in imaginary societies with very weird sexual mores. The best satire in this book is about the world of academia at the University of Chicago. He observes, quite correctly, that most academics are not intellectuals. De Sade is another obvious influence. I haven’t read any of de Sade’s famous novels of extreme sex and cruelty like The 120 Days of Sodom but only a short story collection in Spanish translation titled Cuentos. I bought it in Buenos Aires, where classics are available cheaply. The cuentos, or tales, have very little which is sexually explicit, but I noticed that de Sade is an expert at showing the corruption of priests, politicians and aristocrats. Like the Marquis de Sade, Isham leads a life that would shock the moralists of his time, while he takes aim at the hypocrisies he sees in society. Cook isn’t de Sade though; he isn’t rotting away in a prison – there is no sadism here, just sexual lust and frustration more extreme, or at least honestly revealed, than in the regular individual.
Structurally, William Burroughs’ loosely connected vignettes of sex and drugs in Naked Lunch are comparable and Isham’s prose can resemble the lengthy opium-dream passages of Thomas De Quincey. His detailed LSD trips, along with asides about classical music, are well-written but not as interesting as the politically incorrect sex and philosophy. According to Isham in the current PC world promiscuity is only OK for homosexuals – that’s fine, he says, an advance on the days of condemning sodomites. Why though have we now become so uncomfortable about heterosexual drives? He has some homosexual encounters in this book, which may be the best defence against being labelled homophobic? Isham makes no secret that he’s influenced by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, especially when it comes to opposing bourgeois society. All the episodes related could be called burlesques of Isham’s life – but unlike in Steppenwolf, we are unsure when we are inside the Magic Theatre or in the real world. To write this review properly I really should re-read Steppenwolf, which I haven’t thought about for twenty years.
Calling out society’s repressed attitude towards sex is Luna, a Chinese lover of Isham’s. She is wonderfully liberated, spreading her genital crabs with glee:
“LUNA. It’s my gift to you. ISHAM. An infection? LUNA. Oh, come on. They’re harmless. They’re in a – what do you call it? – symbiotic relationship with you, like the billions of bacteria already coating your penis. ISHAM. Why not ask me and try to convince me beforehand? LUNA. You wouldn’t have understood. Sometimes we have to be shown rather than told. ISHAM. What do you mean by symbiotic? LUNA. They feed off filth. They’re cleaning you. And the itching they cause is incredibly satisfying, a constant sexual stimulation. Though I admit maybe they’re more suited to women. They make me lubricate continuously.”
Luna lacks a strong voice of her own; she is too much Astarte to Isham’s Manfred. She embarks on a number of rants, one of which is about how eating food in public could be considered more disgusting than public sex:
“Couldn’t that be considered obscene in its own right and distressing in the public eye? Isn’t eating just vomiting in reverse? Why is it that we don’t consider it as such? I would say it’s because the urge to eat is just a bit stronger than the sexual urge.”
She also talks about how sugar is the most dangerous drug. These diatribes shine a light on how squeamish we are about sex and draconian about drugs far less harmful than sugar. Luna was born in Africa, and went to school there – she is a remover of the veil of illusion (that is the drab bourgeois world) like Hermine in Steppenwolf. She also arranges for Isham to have sexual pleasure with Adalat, another Chinese woman, this time an ethnic Uighur – much like Hermine introduces Harry to Maria in Steppenwolf.
However, Isham ends up raping Adalat. The rape is not violent – and the protagonist doesn’t feel guilty. If I refer to the biblically based exposition in chapter seven (Isham keeps his Bible close one notes), it may have been what he calls a ‘cooperative rape’. This was the episode in this novel, designed to disturb, which got to me. Humans do bad things, but I haven’t thrown off the idea of contrition and redemption – I like to lessen the hammer of the Christian superego but not jettison it completely. While Hesse balances his rebellion against bourgeois society with a turn towards Eastern spirituality, this is absent in Lust and Philosophy. You have to remember that Isham has seen the East, that is China, go from drab communism in 1990 to ultra-capitalism of the least spiritual kind (this book was published in 2012).
Isham, like Nietzsche, is not a big fan of guilt it would seem. He claims doing wrong to others brings them pain certainly, but it helps them develop. Forgiveness is not something he is into either:
“I am philosophically opposed to the condescending rhetorical gesture known as forgiveness. My enemy is better off without it. I rather regarded her offenses against me as badges of honor earned in the struggle for mutual recognition, her failings as beautiful scars attained in the battle of life. As Nietzsche advised, learn to hate the one you love in order to ennoble this person as your proud and honest enemy – and one thus genuinely worthy of your love.”
And guilt can often make people vindictive and vicious. This is exemplified by his experience in massage school in the States where he is accused of sexual misconduct:
“I scour my memory for any other incidents that might have contributed to my selection as a scapegoat for the class’s surplus of sexual guilt. Nobody enters a massage school unburdened with some brand of sexual baggage. It’s what draws one to massage, just as psychologists are drawn to their profession as a way to work through their own mental issues.”
Near the end there is a description of a mental breakdown, great writing about something hard to describe. I’ve tried to write something about my experience in 2014 at Beijing airport when I was in the first stages of a breakdown. All I could come up with was that in the airport everything took on a liquid aspect – when your nerves are completely out of whack even your optic nerve is affected. The next part for me was near insomnia, I could only doze because anxiety continually jolted me awake. Here is Isham’s take:
“Most people at some point in their life fall under the sway of demons and feel powerless to protect themselves from internal destruction. A classic case is severe sleeplessness: the despair of being locked awake, clenched tight by another force, stripped of the ability to relax and let the body’s loving narcosis do its work. Only by the greatest mercy was I allowed to catch enough snatches of sleep to fend off escalating insanity and rapid death from the venom of full-blown insomnia.”
Finally we return to the Beijing streets looking for Cookie. Lust and Philosophy has been an entertaining ride and Isham has hammered home his vision of a new free sex society:
“The following operative principles are always taken for granted and can be considered laws: 1) any two people who want to have sex with each other should do so, promptly and without undue fuss; 2) where the desire is not mutual, the one with the lesser desire should consider offering sex for the sake of generosity.”
Arthur Meursault (another China expat author, and obviously a fan of Camus) explains in his review of Isham’s American Rococo why this free love vision won’t work – that it won’t make people happier and how only a select few will benefit. Throwing things out and starting at year zero never seems to work well. Isham shouldn’t be the founding father of a new society – but he is the strongest voice I’ve encountered in calling out the hypocrisies and problems society currently has around sex. Which society you ask, China or America? When it comes to sex I’ve found them a bit different. In America they start experimenting as teenagers and continue to have hook-ups in their twenties and beyond, but once they are married, infidelity is a big no-no; monogamy is very highly valued. In China the young are quite chaste. However, once married and with a child or two produced, they chase then their sexual desires. It’s OK as long as it’s discreet. It usually advantages men who can visit KTVs, bars, hairdresser salons – all places full of prostitutes – or if they are rich they can set up a mistress. This doesn’t mean married Chinese women don’t have their own adventures. This is a gross generalisation of course, but it seemed to me the major difference in approach to sex when I was in China. (America here just means the ‘West’ really.) In the West you play before marriage, China after tying the knot. Not much of a conclusion to the review? A loosely structured review for a loosely structured book.
“They made love. Adam had his first taste of pussy. Eve had her first orgasm. Up till that point it had merely relieved an itch, something they had scarcely been aware of doing, but now it clicked – how cool sex was. They realized as well how much time had been lost. Their anger grew as they understood their predicament, and the solution likewise became clear. Ialdabaoth was powerful only as long as he nourished himself on others’ ignorance and fear. But why run away from Eden only to let Ialdabaoth remain in control? That very night as he slept, Adam and Eve slit his throat. They stuffed his penis in his mouth, popped his testicles into his eye sockets and smoked his eyes.”
Another major theme is that we live in societies full of inexplicably obstructive rules and individuals. My favourite quote in the book is:
“Why is it people routinely excel at being stubborn and difficult while avoiding at all costs whatever is easy and wonderful?”
The narrative follows the whims and the wide-ranging interests of the erudite Isham; he finds links that leave mere mortals behind. The starting point is Isham’s spotting of an alluring Chinese woman he dubs Cookie on a Beijing street. Isham’s descriptions of Chinese streets aren’t plentiful in this work, but I appreciated what there was:
“A Japanese restaurant on the corner. Hair salons, massage parlors, donkey meat eateries, groceries, a popular Manchurian restaurant. A Hunan restaurant. A Xinjiang restaurant. More hair salons along the street’s darker western stretch before it linked back to Changwa Middle Road, these salons being of the shabbier variety, with handjob services. Another Japanese restaurant on the corner, a teahouse on the facing corner.”
He wants to approach Cookie and muses on the fraught undertaking that is addressing a stranger on the street. He is hopeful she’ll stop and he can achieve his goal of sexual conquest. On the other hand if she is on her way to work he might be ignored.
“But I cannot deny the deeply ingrained norms of behavior we are all burdened with: the same unconscious compulsion that makes us swivel around when the policeman hails us keeps us pointed straight ahead on our way to work.”
Before he could become Isham Cook the writer who works at a university in Beijing and pursues Chinese women, he had to throw off an oppressive superego that controlled him through fear rather than guilt. Freud thought the superego came from the father – a strict father could mean a rigid moral code – and great guilt resulted when it was (almost) inevitably transgressed. Society too functions like a superego telling the individual what to do. In the contract for being a member of a civilised society is a clause stating we need to sublimate much of our natural aggressive and sexual drives into work and art. Those who have difficulty with this (nearly everyone at some stage or another) will get into trouble and damage their standing. In chapter two we meet the nine-year-old Isham, and after an exposition on battleships, one of the least entertaining asides in the book, we learn that his divorced mother has married an ex Jesuit priest named Joe. Also in this chapter Isham is sexually abused at summer camp – his take on the incident is predictably different from what you might expect. Joe becomes the overbearing superego in Isham’s life:
“The harangues take place every three weeks or so, after a buildup of hostile silence. I never know what he is angry about until the harangue begins, but whatever it is, it always concerns the same petty infractions. They are permanently registered on a yellow pad of legal paper, the list filling up more and more of the pad over the years, so he can flip through the pages to remind me how many instances of the same infraction were previously committed, dates recorded in the margins. Nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven.”
Joe reminded me of Dwight, the evil stepfather in Tobias Wolff’s novel, This Boy’s Life. Dwight, an alcoholic like Joe, was well played by Robert De Niro in the movie. It’s a fair bet there won’t be a film version of Lust and Philosophy – a shame. While Joe is important, Isham’s mother is a complete non-entity in the novel.
I can imagine Cook writing a Swiftian satire where he travels in imaginary societies with very weird sexual mores. The best satire in this book is about the world of academia at the University of Chicago. He observes, quite correctly, that most academics are not intellectuals. De Sade is another obvious influence. I haven’t read any of de Sade’s famous novels of extreme sex and cruelty like The 120 Days of Sodom but only a short story collection in Spanish translation titled Cuentos. I bought it in Buenos Aires, where classics are available cheaply. The cuentos, or tales, have very little which is sexually explicit, but I noticed that de Sade is an expert at showing the corruption of priests, politicians and aristocrats. Like the Marquis de Sade, Isham leads a life that would shock the moralists of his time, while he takes aim at the hypocrisies he sees in society. Cook isn’t de Sade though; he isn’t rotting away in a prison – there is no sadism here, just sexual lust and frustration more extreme, or at least honestly revealed, than in the regular individual.
Structurally, William Burroughs’ loosely connected vignettes of sex and drugs in Naked Lunch are comparable and Isham’s prose can resemble the lengthy opium-dream passages of Thomas De Quincey. His detailed LSD trips, along with asides about classical music, are well-written but not as interesting as the politically incorrect sex and philosophy. According to Isham in the current PC world promiscuity is only OK for homosexuals – that’s fine, he says, an advance on the days of condemning sodomites. Why though have we now become so uncomfortable about heterosexual drives? He has some homosexual encounters in this book, which may be the best defence against being labelled homophobic? Isham makes no secret that he’s influenced by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, especially when it comes to opposing bourgeois society. All the episodes related could be called burlesques of Isham’s life – but unlike in Steppenwolf, we are unsure when we are inside the Magic Theatre or in the real world. To write this review properly I really should re-read Steppenwolf, which I haven’t thought about for twenty years.
Calling out society’s repressed attitude towards sex is Luna, a Chinese lover of Isham’s. She is wonderfully liberated, spreading her genital crabs with glee:
“LUNA. It’s my gift to you. ISHAM. An infection? LUNA. Oh, come on. They’re harmless. They’re in a – what do you call it? – symbiotic relationship with you, like the billions of bacteria already coating your penis. ISHAM. Why not ask me and try to convince me beforehand? LUNA. You wouldn’t have understood. Sometimes we have to be shown rather than told. ISHAM. What do you mean by symbiotic? LUNA. They feed off filth. They’re cleaning you. And the itching they cause is incredibly satisfying, a constant sexual stimulation. Though I admit maybe they’re more suited to women. They make me lubricate continuously.”
Luna lacks a strong voice of her own; she is too much Astarte to Isham’s Manfred. She embarks on a number of rants, one of which is about how eating food in public could be considered more disgusting than public sex:
“Couldn’t that be considered obscene in its own right and distressing in the public eye? Isn’t eating just vomiting in reverse? Why is it that we don’t consider it as such? I would say it’s because the urge to eat is just a bit stronger than the sexual urge.”
She also talks about how sugar is the most dangerous drug. These diatribes shine a light on how squeamish we are about sex and draconian about drugs far less harmful than sugar. Luna was born in Africa, and went to school there – she is a remover of the veil of illusion (that is the drab bourgeois world) like Hermine in Steppenwolf. She also arranges for Isham to have sexual pleasure with Adalat, another Chinese woman, this time an ethnic Uighur – much like Hermine introduces Harry to Maria in Steppenwolf.
However, Isham ends up raping Adalat. The rape is not violent – and the protagonist doesn’t feel guilty. If I refer to the biblically based exposition in chapter seven (Isham keeps his Bible close one notes), it may have been what he calls a ‘cooperative rape’. This was the episode in this novel, designed to disturb, which got to me. Humans do bad things, but I haven’t thrown off the idea of contrition and redemption – I like to lessen the hammer of the Christian superego but not jettison it completely. While Hesse balances his rebellion against bourgeois society with a turn towards Eastern spirituality, this is absent in Lust and Philosophy. You have to remember that Isham has seen the East, that is China, go from drab communism in 1990 to ultra-capitalism of the least spiritual kind (this book was published in 2012).
Isham, like Nietzsche, is not a big fan of guilt it would seem. He claims doing wrong to others brings them pain certainly, but it helps them develop. Forgiveness is not something he is into either:
“I am philosophically opposed to the condescending rhetorical gesture known as forgiveness. My enemy is better off without it. I rather regarded her offenses against me as badges of honor earned in the struggle for mutual recognition, her failings as beautiful scars attained in the battle of life. As Nietzsche advised, learn to hate the one you love in order to ennoble this person as your proud and honest enemy – and one thus genuinely worthy of your love.”
And guilt can often make people vindictive and vicious. This is exemplified by his experience in massage school in the States where he is accused of sexual misconduct:
“I scour my memory for any other incidents that might have contributed to my selection as a scapegoat for the class’s surplus of sexual guilt. Nobody enters a massage school unburdened with some brand of sexual baggage. It’s what draws one to massage, just as psychologists are drawn to their profession as a way to work through their own mental issues.”
Near the end there is a description of a mental breakdown, great writing about something hard to describe. I’ve tried to write something about my experience in 2014 at Beijing airport when I was in the first stages of a breakdown. All I could come up with was that in the airport everything took on a liquid aspect – when your nerves are completely out of whack even your optic nerve is affected. The next part for me was near insomnia, I could only doze because anxiety continually jolted me awake. Here is Isham’s take:
“Most people at some point in their life fall under the sway of demons and feel powerless to protect themselves from internal destruction. A classic case is severe sleeplessness: the despair of being locked awake, clenched tight by another force, stripped of the ability to relax and let the body’s loving narcosis do its work. Only by the greatest mercy was I allowed to catch enough snatches of sleep to fend off escalating insanity and rapid death from the venom of full-blown insomnia.”
Finally we return to the Beijing streets looking for Cookie. Lust and Philosophy has been an entertaining ride and Isham has hammered home his vision of a new free sex society:
“The following operative principles are always taken for granted and can be considered laws: 1) any two people who want to have sex with each other should do so, promptly and without undue fuss; 2) where the desire is not mutual, the one with the lesser desire should consider offering sex for the sake of generosity.”
Arthur Meursault (another China expat author, and obviously a fan of Camus) explains in his review of Isham’s American Rococo why this free love vision won’t work – that it won’t make people happier and how only a select few will benefit. Throwing things out and starting at year zero never seems to work well. Isham shouldn’t be the founding father of a new society – but he is the strongest voice I’ve encountered in calling out the hypocrisies and problems society currently has around sex. Which society you ask, China or America? When it comes to sex I’ve found them a bit different. In America they start experimenting as teenagers and continue to have hook-ups in their twenties and beyond, but once they are married, infidelity is a big no-no; monogamy is very highly valued. In China the young are quite chaste. However, once married and with a child or two produced, they chase then their sexual desires. It’s OK as long as it’s discreet. It usually advantages men who can visit KTVs, bars, hairdresser salons – all places full of prostitutes – or if they are rich they can set up a mistress. This doesn’t mean married Chinese women don’t have their own adventures. This is a gross generalisation of course, but it seemed to me the major difference in approach to sex when I was in China. (America here just means the ‘West’ really.) In the West you play before marriage, China after tying the knot. Not much of a conclusion to the review? A loosely structured review for a loosely structured book.
November 20, 2016
This book starts with basic philosophy and carefully applies it to the narrator's view of lust and sex. We get the narrator's definition of his " perfect ten" and resolution to go after his encounters of women declared as tens. His encounters are interesting and the reader enjoys reading about them. His women are unique, independent and some quirky.
The author writes very well and has great command of vocabulary. The book appeals to the intelligent reader.
The author writes very well and has great command of vocabulary. The book appeals to the intelligent reader.
September 14, 2013
"Like a circle in a spiral, Like a wheel within a wheel..." (Spoiler Warning)
This novel flies out to the farthest reaches and then folds back in on itself. Lust and Philosophy is a tale disjointed in time, self-indulgent and sexually charged like the first generation of 20th century novels that fought obscenity laws. It claims to be a novel, but is no more a novel than Tropic of Cancer or Naked Lunch, even if equally enticing. As Naked Lunch drags a reader into the world of drug addiction, Lust and Philosophy thrusts a reader into a microcosm of sexual obsession. "Even if parts of it disgust you," Orwell might have said about this book instead of Tropic of Cancer, "it will stick in your memory." The Holy Ghost certainly does not reside within the inkwell of the author of Lust and Philosophy, nor cling to the quill of his pen
Preferring literary fiction, the author disdains "certain formulaic constraints geared to profitability (the first page that "grabs" you, the compelling storyline, heart-wrenching sympathetic characters, and the like)." So it should not be surprising that Lust and Philosophy is impossible to review for plot, character, narrative or theme in any usual way. It has no plot, the characters mostly are one-dimensional, the non-linear narrative is "to there and back again," and theme is really just preoccupation. Considered together with other non-novels, however, Lust and Philosophy holds its own as a literary essay ready to morph into a novel - when the author's not looking.
The narrator of Lust and Philosophy, called Isham, is an expatriate American living in Beijing. A mandarin-speaking English teacher, with many young Chinese women as students, Isham is a Sinopath immersed in a milieu of simmering sexuality, constantly tempted by the provender surrounding him. Many if not most expat English teachers fastidiously avoid the temptation, some dally with willing students, but Isham emerges as an unrestrained libertine. At first glance, this looks like a classic teacher-student sexual predator tale emerging, but the women with whom Isham does become involved are never his students, and so it is likely that daily exposure to his female students merely keeps Isham on edge. Lust and Philosophy begins with an encounter in the street.
"Walking ahead of me was a woman with intensely voluptuous hips in tight faded jeans and jean jacket.... She gazed ahead oblivious of my glance. I continued on without looking back and dismissed the painful specter from my mind."
The allure of Cookie established, Isham muses over some of the other women he has known. He explains, "we try to connect when we meet people...find some common ground with a stranger. Perhaps you have nothing to go on but a liking of spicy food or a hatred of the president. The mutual attempt at simple human friendliness is often enough." This goes little distance to acquit Isham's mania for laying every arousing woman he encounters, or his sexual fetishes, which he describes at length with the brass of Durrell or Miller. Cookie becomes the elusive, unattainable apparition Isham stalks through the rest of the book.
Interleaved with recollections of the U. S. and China are ruminations about Shakespeare, the Bible, sexual assault, de Sade, Julie Andrews breasts (as exposed in the 1981 film S.O.B), social semiotics, sustainable agriculture, and more. Miller, also, placed little islands of essay in the middle of his sordid sea of sexuality - which many readers just skip over to get to the next sex scene.
Isham retells the version of Adam and Eve that we have from the Gnostic gospels, wherein the snake is Jesus, the apple is a psychedelic mushroom, Adam and Eve get high on the mushrooms and Red Lebanese hashish, taste the delights of sex, kill God, raze the wall of Eden and free all the animals. From these flawed progenitors was passed down the gene with a trait for ferocious sexual appetite that spawned generations of "mystery cults, secret phallic cabals, vagina-worshiping covens..." - and Isham.
In another aside, Isham suggests that the Annunciation as depicted in Simone Martini's was actually a rape (in contrast to the romantic way it was painted in the Middle Ages). Isham cites a description of this encounter found in a text by Hodge and Kress on Social Semiotics, an arcane theory of linguistics that looks at how textual meaning is interpreted. In Hodge and Kress, the spatial distance between Gabriel and Mary is examined to see what their body language says about the event, but in Isham's mind the event escalates. "Force is applied, resulting in a sharp reflex and cry. It hurts, but the seed is already implanted by the time Mary realizes what is going on...squirted all over with the 'cloud of dew' of God's semen." This leads to a convoluted discussion of the kinds and degrees of "rape." Social Semiotics may raise the tone of Isham's discussion, but these interpretations of Adam and Eve and the Annunciation still are not likely to win readers among Christian fundamentalists.
Isham enters a memory vortex and time swims back to drug-hazed memories of traveling in Europe and India, with Adalat (a Uyghur, we learn later). Luna barrels onto the stage - a lady with erotic genius - who becomes the best-rendered character in the story. Born in Africa to Chinese parents, Luna grew up outside the diaspora of Chinese sexual repression. She is a cornucopia of quirky ideas, and a succubus with insatiable lust - looney Luna. In one of Isham's first encounters with Luna, they meet in a Chinese coffee shop, where in a booth she slurps him to erection, leaps onto his lap, and uses her skill at pompoir to squeeze him to ejaculation and drench him in her rancid jissom - the ultimate wet dream, at least for the initiated. She gives him a dose of crotch crabs, too, and can't understand why he doesn't like her little pets.
Much later, finally settled in Beijing, in the present, Isham, Luna, and Adalat become a threesome who camp overnight west of the capital and along the Great Wall. On a final trip, Isham forces Adalat to have sex and, shortly after, he is confronted by vengeful Luna in a coffeehouse. Here the real warping of time begins, because the reader is led to believe the coffeehouse is in Chicago. Upset by Luna, Isham "lurched out of the coffeehouse and into a nightmare. I was no longer on Broadway but Guijie, Ghost Street, in Beijing. It was evening rather than morning." He stumbles into another coffeehouse, realizes his visa has expired, that he is in China illegally, and flees in a panic. On the street in Beijing, he steps on a loose manhole cover and, like Alice down the rabbit hole, falls through. Isham's time below the streets is no less hallucinogenic.
From this point, the narrative becomes taut and convoluted - the circle spins in the spiral and the wheel within the wheel, beginning and ending incessantly, images coursing through Isham's mind. Then, he sees her. Cookie.
"Walking ahead of me was a woman with intensely voluptuous hips in tight faded jeans and jean jacket.... She gazed ahead oblivious of my glance. I continued on without looking back and was about to dismiss the painful specter from my mind but then hesitated and slowed my pace."
The circular narrative of Lust and Philosophy is not as disjointed as Naked Lunch but, in the end, like Naked Lunch, it just stops. At the end of the book, Isham repeats nearly the same description that began the book, leaving the reader to wonder if the entire story has happened in only the moment it took Isham to decide whether to approach Cookie. After all his exploring, Isham arrives where he started. It's an ending like Finnegans Wake, returning to the beginning from the end:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's...
A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun...
This novel flies out to the farthest reaches and then folds back in on itself. Lust and Philosophy is a tale disjointed in time, self-indulgent and sexually charged like the first generation of 20th century novels that fought obscenity laws. It claims to be a novel, but is no more a novel than Tropic of Cancer or Naked Lunch, even if equally enticing. As Naked Lunch drags a reader into the world of drug addiction, Lust and Philosophy thrusts a reader into a microcosm of sexual obsession. "Even if parts of it disgust you," Orwell might have said about this book instead of Tropic of Cancer, "it will stick in your memory." The Holy Ghost certainly does not reside within the inkwell of the author of Lust and Philosophy, nor cling to the quill of his pen
Preferring literary fiction, the author disdains "certain formulaic constraints geared to profitability (the first page that "grabs" you, the compelling storyline, heart-wrenching sympathetic characters, and the like)." So it should not be surprising that Lust and Philosophy is impossible to review for plot, character, narrative or theme in any usual way. It has no plot, the characters mostly are one-dimensional, the non-linear narrative is "to there and back again," and theme is really just preoccupation. Considered together with other non-novels, however, Lust and Philosophy holds its own as a literary essay ready to morph into a novel - when the author's not looking.
The narrator of Lust and Philosophy, called Isham, is an expatriate American living in Beijing. A mandarin-speaking English teacher, with many young Chinese women as students, Isham is a Sinopath immersed in a milieu of simmering sexuality, constantly tempted by the provender surrounding him. Many if not most expat English teachers fastidiously avoid the temptation, some dally with willing students, but Isham emerges as an unrestrained libertine. At first glance, this looks like a classic teacher-student sexual predator tale emerging, but the women with whom Isham does become involved are never his students, and so it is likely that daily exposure to his female students merely keeps Isham on edge. Lust and Philosophy begins with an encounter in the street.
"Walking ahead of me was a woman with intensely voluptuous hips in tight faded jeans and jean jacket.... She gazed ahead oblivious of my glance. I continued on without looking back and dismissed the painful specter from my mind."
The allure of Cookie established, Isham muses over some of the other women he has known. He explains, "we try to connect when we meet people...find some common ground with a stranger. Perhaps you have nothing to go on but a liking of spicy food or a hatred of the president. The mutual attempt at simple human friendliness is often enough." This goes little distance to acquit Isham's mania for laying every arousing woman he encounters, or his sexual fetishes, which he describes at length with the brass of Durrell or Miller. Cookie becomes the elusive, unattainable apparition Isham stalks through the rest of the book.
Interleaved with recollections of the U. S. and China are ruminations about Shakespeare, the Bible, sexual assault, de Sade, Julie Andrews breasts (as exposed in the 1981 film S.O.B), social semiotics, sustainable agriculture, and more. Miller, also, placed little islands of essay in the middle of his sordid sea of sexuality - which many readers just skip over to get to the next sex scene.
Isham retells the version of Adam and Eve that we have from the Gnostic gospels, wherein the snake is Jesus, the apple is a psychedelic mushroom, Adam and Eve get high on the mushrooms and Red Lebanese hashish, taste the delights of sex, kill God, raze the wall of Eden and free all the animals. From these flawed progenitors was passed down the gene with a trait for ferocious sexual appetite that spawned generations of "mystery cults, secret phallic cabals, vagina-worshiping covens..." - and Isham.
In another aside, Isham suggests that the Annunciation as depicted in Simone Martini's was actually a rape (in contrast to the romantic way it was painted in the Middle Ages). Isham cites a description of this encounter found in a text by Hodge and Kress on Social Semiotics, an arcane theory of linguistics that looks at how textual meaning is interpreted. In Hodge and Kress, the spatial distance between Gabriel and Mary is examined to see what their body language says about the event, but in Isham's mind the event escalates. "Force is applied, resulting in a sharp reflex and cry. It hurts, but the seed is already implanted by the time Mary realizes what is going on...squirted all over with the 'cloud of dew' of God's semen." This leads to a convoluted discussion of the kinds and degrees of "rape." Social Semiotics may raise the tone of Isham's discussion, but these interpretations of Adam and Eve and the Annunciation still are not likely to win readers among Christian fundamentalists.
Isham enters a memory vortex and time swims back to drug-hazed memories of traveling in Europe and India, with Adalat (a Uyghur, we learn later). Luna barrels onto the stage - a lady with erotic genius - who becomes the best-rendered character in the story. Born in Africa to Chinese parents, Luna grew up outside the diaspora of Chinese sexual repression. She is a cornucopia of quirky ideas, and a succubus with insatiable lust - looney Luna. In one of Isham's first encounters with Luna, they meet in a Chinese coffee shop, where in a booth she slurps him to erection, leaps onto his lap, and uses her skill at pompoir to squeeze him to ejaculation and drench him in her rancid jissom - the ultimate wet dream, at least for the initiated. She gives him a dose of crotch crabs, too, and can't understand why he doesn't like her little pets.
Much later, finally settled in Beijing, in the present, Isham, Luna, and Adalat become a threesome who camp overnight west of the capital and along the Great Wall. On a final trip, Isham forces Adalat to have sex and, shortly after, he is confronted by vengeful Luna in a coffeehouse. Here the real warping of time begins, because the reader is led to believe the coffeehouse is in Chicago. Upset by Luna, Isham "lurched out of the coffeehouse and into a nightmare. I was no longer on Broadway but Guijie, Ghost Street, in Beijing. It was evening rather than morning." He stumbles into another coffeehouse, realizes his visa has expired, that he is in China illegally, and flees in a panic. On the street in Beijing, he steps on a loose manhole cover and, like Alice down the rabbit hole, falls through. Isham's time below the streets is no less hallucinogenic.
From this point, the narrative becomes taut and convoluted - the circle spins in the spiral and the wheel within the wheel, beginning and ending incessantly, images coursing through Isham's mind. Then, he sees her. Cookie.
"Walking ahead of me was a woman with intensely voluptuous hips in tight faded jeans and jean jacket.... She gazed ahead oblivious of my glance. I continued on without looking back and was about to dismiss the painful specter from my mind but then hesitated and slowed my pace."
The circular narrative of Lust and Philosophy is not as disjointed as Naked Lunch but, in the end, like Naked Lunch, it just stops. At the end of the book, Isham repeats nearly the same description that began the book, leaving the reader to wonder if the entire story has happened in only the moment it took Isham to decide whether to approach Cookie. After all his exploring, Isham arrives where he started. It's an ending like Finnegans Wake, returning to the beginning from the end:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's...
A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun...
March 24, 2018
Desperately Seeking Susan except that her name is really unknown and the author opts to call her Cookie. Part autobiographical, part musings on societal norms, historical battleships, and whatever else catches his free wheeling imagination, including the statistical probability of merely running into her vs. engineering a meeting. Perhaps Cookie is merely a daydream. And perhaps she is best left there (or until the next one comes along).
January 27, 2013
Well-written and highly entertaining
Just as the title suggests, the novel is an erotic and philosophical one, with interesting stories and adventures, refreshing and entertaining ideas, all of those elements keep you intrigued and reading. There are insights, music, paintings and arts in it, an entertainment for the mind; also, the lustful descriptions make you horny.
It starts with the protagonist’s pursuit of and obsession with a beautiful and voluptuous woman named Cookie, and then we see how the mind of an obsessive man waiting for his prey works, philosophy begins to take shape and we come to know what the lustful philosophy is and the author did a good job of justifying it (I admire his persuasive logic). We meet Luna, an extremely unconventional and free-spirited woman along the way, with all kinds of odd, shocking yet fascinating behaviors and ideas, I find her charming and hilarious, craziness becomes adorable here. An unforgettable image in the literary world.
The philosophical parts keep your mind working busily, while the biographical chapters give you some time to relax and enjoy good stories and adventures, though the acid trips can be very intense and even scary at times. I enjoy watching all kinds of people show up on Isham’s stage. The University of Chicago and massage school parts are especially fun to read, yes, it’s a dark comedy with a great sense of humor.
Then we shift from the realistic biographical part to the surreal and philosophical part when Isham’s first trip to Shanghai is finished, and at the end of the novel, Cookie reappears, the novel ends in a perfect circle. It’s quite a different experience from my previous fiction readings, challenging to both my mind and dramatically different ways of looking at the world and sex, it’s quite a thrilling reading trip, letting me have a glimpse of something different from my everyday experience, just as all good readings provide. The novel is very well-written (good sentences with every word well-chosen), well-expressed and wild-imagined. However, it lacks something that touches me, something I identify with since it depicts a sex utopia which will never be possible in my opinion. I read it for fun and good English. Nevertheless, I recommend it to anyone who would like to try an unconventional way of thinking and writing.
Just as the title suggests, the novel is an erotic and philosophical one, with interesting stories and adventures, refreshing and entertaining ideas, all of those elements keep you intrigued and reading. There are insights, music, paintings and arts in it, an entertainment for the mind; also, the lustful descriptions make you horny.
It starts with the protagonist’s pursuit of and obsession with a beautiful and voluptuous woman named Cookie, and then we see how the mind of an obsessive man waiting for his prey works, philosophy begins to take shape and we come to know what the lustful philosophy is and the author did a good job of justifying it (I admire his persuasive logic). We meet Luna, an extremely unconventional and free-spirited woman along the way, with all kinds of odd, shocking yet fascinating behaviors and ideas, I find her charming and hilarious, craziness becomes adorable here. An unforgettable image in the literary world.
The philosophical parts keep your mind working busily, while the biographical chapters give you some time to relax and enjoy good stories and adventures, though the acid trips can be very intense and even scary at times. I enjoy watching all kinds of people show up on Isham’s stage. The University of Chicago and massage school parts are especially fun to read, yes, it’s a dark comedy with a great sense of humor.
Then we shift from the realistic biographical part to the surreal and philosophical part when Isham’s first trip to Shanghai is finished, and at the end of the novel, Cookie reappears, the novel ends in a perfect circle. It’s quite a different experience from my previous fiction readings, challenging to both my mind and dramatically different ways of looking at the world and sex, it’s quite a thrilling reading trip, letting me have a glimpse of something different from my everyday experience, just as all good readings provide. The novel is very well-written (good sentences with every word well-chosen), well-expressed and wild-imagined. However, it lacks something that touches me, something I identify with since it depicts a sex utopia which will never be possible in my opinion. I read it for fun and good English. Nevertheless, I recommend it to anyone who would like to try an unconventional way of thinking and writing.
October 24, 2016
Lust & Philosophy is Isham Cook’s first novel and radically different from his other books.
This is a bizarre novel, and your mileage will vary depending on your own personality. The plot is a meandering stream of consciousness that begins with Isham’s attempts to track down an attractive but elusive woman he spots intermittently around the Haidian district of Beijing, but spirals into a history of Isham’s childhood and relationships whilst simultaneously detouring into lengthy observations on philosophy and literature.
It’s not an easy book to read. It’s a stream of consciousness rather than a real plot. How well-read you are will also determine your enjoyment of the novel. There are more than a few parallels between Lust & Philosophy and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Isham even gives us a little literary clue – his company name that he uses to self-publish his works is called “Magic Theatre Books”: a sly wink to Hesse. According to the biography presented within Lust & Philosophy (I have no idea whether the childhood tales Isham narrates about himself are real or not), Isham goes through a period of wandering and homelessness just like the protagonist in Steppenwolf, and like Steppenwolf this novel transforms into an almost-mystical overview of one man’s life that travels back and forth between time and space. Once you understand what Isham is trying to achieve here the plot makes a lot more sense, but the average reader will most likely be at a lost as to what the hell Isham is writing about. His audience, accordingly, will be extremely niche.
Lust & Philosophy will most likely lose some readers due to its challenging nature. However, if you persevere with Isham, the rewards are there. The prose of Lust & Philosophy is some of his most beautiful work and there are a number of deep thoughts and threads to be found within. If the reader is willing to invest some time into reading the book carefully, and doing some individual research on the philosophical detours that Isham takes, then they will take away something of value from Lust & Philosophy.
This is a bizarre novel, and your mileage will vary depending on your own personality. The plot is a meandering stream of consciousness that begins with Isham’s attempts to track down an attractive but elusive woman he spots intermittently around the Haidian district of Beijing, but spirals into a history of Isham’s childhood and relationships whilst simultaneously detouring into lengthy observations on philosophy and literature.
It’s not an easy book to read. It’s a stream of consciousness rather than a real plot. How well-read you are will also determine your enjoyment of the novel. There are more than a few parallels between Lust & Philosophy and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Isham even gives us a little literary clue – his company name that he uses to self-publish his works is called “Magic Theatre Books”: a sly wink to Hesse. According to the biography presented within Lust & Philosophy (I have no idea whether the childhood tales Isham narrates about himself are real or not), Isham goes through a period of wandering and homelessness just like the protagonist in Steppenwolf, and like Steppenwolf this novel transforms into an almost-mystical overview of one man’s life that travels back and forth between time and space. Once you understand what Isham is trying to achieve here the plot makes a lot more sense, but the average reader will most likely be at a lost as to what the hell Isham is writing about. His audience, accordingly, will be extremely niche.
Lust & Philosophy will most likely lose some readers due to its challenging nature. However, if you persevere with Isham, the rewards are there. The prose of Lust & Philosophy is some of his most beautiful work and there are a number of deep thoughts and threads to be found within. If the reader is willing to invest some time into reading the book carefully, and doing some individual research on the philosophical detours that Isham takes, then they will take away something of value from Lust & Philosophy.
December 6, 2016
Ex-Pat in Beijing, Isham Cook, takes us through the mundane life of an adjunct English faculty member that turns out to be not so mundane after all. Isham has a habit of turning every interaction that is supposed to be just between a teacher and student in English into something suggestive. When he isn't doing that; he's setting off the nudity alarms at his massage school that was meant to be an escape from the over-intellectualizing of everything at Univerity of Chicago. Isham has a history of bad luck that precedes all this.
He was born into a family where his mom married a man named Joe who took them all over the world and never allowed Isham the freedom or funds to actually enjoy or experience the places he visited. One particular thing he wanted to experience in all of these places was the women. He improved his success rate as he went and even though his original bewitching beauty in Beijing does a disappearing act, he finds a way that transcends reality to reunite with her.
We follow Isham on a long journey through layers of time in his life, partners, ideas that have been important, works of art that have intrigued deep meditations, and experiments with those meditations on life.
Isham does an excellent job of reflecting the voices, ideas and concerns of a certain type of academic or aspiring academic and the subcultures they often find themselves in to explore identity, beliefs, and sexuality. Lust & Philosophy contains some delightfully quotable passages and is just the thing you might be craving if The Broom of the System didn't have enough sexual encounters for you.
I think the plot could have been a bit tighter and I found it difficult to find the characters sympathetic at times, particularly Isham. He was easiest to understand in the context of rebelling against his stepfather.
He was born into a family where his mom married a man named Joe who took them all over the world and never allowed Isham the freedom or funds to actually enjoy or experience the places he visited. One particular thing he wanted to experience in all of these places was the women. He improved his success rate as he went and even though his original bewitching beauty in Beijing does a disappearing act, he finds a way that transcends reality to reunite with her.
We follow Isham on a long journey through layers of time in his life, partners, ideas that have been important, works of art that have intrigued deep meditations, and experiments with those meditations on life.
Isham does an excellent job of reflecting the voices, ideas and concerns of a certain type of academic or aspiring academic and the subcultures they often find themselves in to explore identity, beliefs, and sexuality. Lust & Philosophy contains some delightfully quotable passages and is just the thing you might be craving if The Broom of the System didn't have enough sexual encounters for you.
I think the plot could have been a bit tighter and I found it difficult to find the characters sympathetic at times, particularly Isham. He was easiest to understand in the context of rebelling against his stepfather.
October 15, 2016
Lust and Philosophy by Isham Cook is a hypnotic saga of a man’s desperate desire to be with a particular woman, even though she is not the first one in his life. This ‘being with’ is in no way spiritual or platonic. It’s a physical attraction to three ‘B’s- beauty, bust and buttocks’, to the extent that it even becomes an obsession. This is described by the narrator’s likeness of his state of mind to that of the situation in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’. It is as violent and mutilating as Lavinia’s rape and cutting of her tongue thereafter, or mother getting ready to eat flesh off her dead sons’ bodies. it is also cross cultural, as the story is set in China with an American protagonist in search of his Chinese love interest. And, there is not one love interest!
As is evident, there is a lot of reference to tradition, including religious, and a lot of questioning. Things are seen in a different light. Everything physical has a reference into the past, and ultimately, they merge into philosophy. The images of Madonna and the child, the description of the Anunciation, all are a representation of sexuality, and the argument is impressive. In fact, Simone Martini’s ‘Annunciation’ (1333) is even said to be hinting at Mary’s rape! (She is no where Mother Mary, or the ghost is the ‘Holy Ghost’.) There are references to other great philosophical works to, including Louis Althusser’s ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Jean Baudrillard.
Style wise, this book is rich with detail, drama and a lucid description. Juxtapositions, contradictions and satire is common. There are surprises. On the other hand, it is also a psychological adventure. It is a good read for those who seek to have deeper understanding of the relationship a man’s mind has with women and their bodies, which the narrator measures on the scale of nine and ten; ten being the perfect.
… Sahar Raman Deep (10/15/16)
As is evident, there is a lot of reference to tradition, including religious, and a lot of questioning. Things are seen in a different light. Everything physical has a reference into the past, and ultimately, they merge into philosophy. The images of Madonna and the child, the description of the Anunciation, all are a representation of sexuality, and the argument is impressive. In fact, Simone Martini’s ‘Annunciation’ (1333) is even said to be hinting at Mary’s rape! (She is no where Mother Mary, or the ghost is the ‘Holy Ghost’.) There are references to other great philosophical works to, including Louis Althusser’s ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Jean Baudrillard.
Style wise, this book is rich with detail, drama and a lucid description. Juxtapositions, contradictions and satire is common. There are surprises. On the other hand, it is also a psychological adventure. It is a good read for those who seek to have deeper understanding of the relationship a man’s mind has with women and their bodies, which the narrator measures on the scale of nine and ten; ten being the perfect.
… Sahar Raman Deep (10/15/16)
April 21, 2014
这是一部难以复述的小说。
从头到尾，小说作者绝不讨好读者和所谓世俗：管你会不会举起女性主义的大旗指责他极度物化女人，他一本正经地跟你讨论对女人身体的品味，条件极度苛刻细致到胸的手感、眉毛的形状；管你是否反感并怀疑他是个性瘾患者，他跟你绘声绘色地讲肛交、3P、“强奸”的故事，还自带一套滴水不漏的理论；管你是否站在道德制高地鄙视他下流，他真的用很诚恳的口吻告诉你他对那个拥有完美身体的女人欲罢不能的着迷和把她弄上床的计划。
在小说的行文上，作者也一点儿没有“配合读者感受”的意思。小说对场景的搭建细致入微，细枝末节都是无可辩驳的真实，勾勒出现场感极为强烈的画面。可是他描写的发生在场景里的每一个人物、故事却都让人难以置信，匪夷所思；故事的线索、年代更是跳跃的，北京、芝加哥、德国、上海、加拿大、日本不断变换，最后还上演了变形记。
所以，无论是从这本小说的主题、态度还是技巧方面来说，你都可能会觉得这本小说让你有种说不出的不自在，带给你无以名状的困扰，但奇怪的是你读着读着发现自己竟然没有办法将其放下。在香艳的情欲故事当中，他给你讲圣经故事、西方音乐史、莎士比亚、食物，他甚至懂中国的风景绘画和日本的园林建筑！他在让你享受的讲述当中，又不断拨弄你的神经，戳你的穴位，挑战你固有的思维和观念。就像你遇到了个美貌无可挑剔的姑娘，她的那点儿小脾气只好忍受了罢；也像是足底按摩，明明过程像是在受虐，过后却真实地感受到了筋骨舒畅、毛孔畅通的享受。
小说塑造的最突出、鲜明角色要数露娜了，也是因为这女的实在是太过惊世骇俗。其余的人物倒是都没有在我心中留下很立体的印象。曲奇/阿黛莱的塑造有些符号化，是作者心中强烈情欲集中指向的对象。主人公阿沙姆则与这本小说本身一样复杂、反传统。作为一名女性读者，我个人有一点好奇的是，小说中可以明显看出，小说作者或是主人公是艺术造诣、审美品位相当不俗的，这也不是一部黄色小说，那两性关系的最有意义的就只是情欲了吗？我试图在小说中找找“爱”的痕迹和描述，也没有什么线索。也许，对于这样的男人来说，情欲的进阶本就不是爱，对……应该是哲学才对。
从头到尾，小说作者绝不讨好读者和所谓世俗：管你会不会举起女性主义的大旗指责他极度物化女人，他一本正经地跟你讨论对女人身体的品味，条件极度苛刻细致到胸的手感、眉毛的形状；管你是否反感并怀疑他是个性瘾患者，他跟你绘声绘色地讲肛交、3P、“强奸”的故事，还自带一套滴水不漏的理论；管你是否站在道德制高地鄙视他下流，他真的用很诚恳的口吻告诉你他对那个拥有完美身体的女人欲罢不能的着迷和把她弄上床的计划。
在小说的行文上，作者也一点儿没有“配合读者感受”的意思。小说对场景的搭建细致入微，细枝末节都是无可辩驳的真实，勾勒出现场感极为强烈的画面。可是他描写的发生在场景里的每一个人物、故事却都让人难以置信，匪夷所思；故事的线索、年代更是跳跃的，北京、芝加哥、德国、上海、加拿大、日本不断变换，最后还上演了变形记。
所以，无论是从这本小说的主题、态度还是技巧方面来说，你都可能会觉得这本小说让你有种说不出的不自在，带给你无以名状的困扰，但奇怪的是你读着读着发现自己竟然没有办法将其放下。在香艳的情欲故事当中，他给你讲圣经故事、西方音乐史、莎士比亚、食物，他甚至懂中国的风景绘画和日本的园林建筑！他在让你享受的讲述当中，又不断拨弄你的神经，戳你的穴位，挑战你固有的思维和观念。就像你遇到了个美貌无可挑剔的姑娘，她的那点儿小脾气只好忍受了罢；也像是足底按摩，明明过程像是在受虐，过后却真实地感受到了筋骨舒畅、毛孔畅通的享受。
小说塑造的最突出、鲜明角色要数露娜了，也是因为这女的实在是太过惊世骇俗。其余的人物倒是都没有在我心中留下很立体的印象。曲奇/阿黛莱的塑造有些符号化，是作者心中强烈情欲集中指向的对象。主人公阿沙姆则与这本小说本身一样复杂、反传统。作为一名女性读者，我个人有一点好奇的是，小说中可以明显看出，小说作者或是主人公是艺术造诣、审美品位相当不俗的，这也不是一部黄色小说，那两性关系的最有意义的就只是情欲了吗？我试图在小说中找找“爱”的痕迹和描述，也没有什么线索。也许，对于这样的男人来说，情欲的进阶本就不是爱，对……应该是哲学才对。
July 14, 2014
这是一部自传性很强的小说，其中第13章到第20章按照时间先后顺序描写了作者从9岁一直到第一次来中国的经历，而其余章节则采用非线性叙述，时间比较跳跃。
书中有主人公艾沙姆小时候受到性侵犯的描写，此外他还有一名性情暴戾的继父，种种因素促成了艾沙姆那惊世骇俗的性道德观。而本书正是对其观念进行辩解的一本书，作者重写了亚当和夏娃的故事，自诩“我们拥有纯粹为了性本身的魅力而享受性生活的能力，也就是说能够在多个性伙伴之间游刃有余”，为情欲正名。难怪有评论质问，为什么只有情欲，没有爱情，作者甚至缺乏正常人的情感，emotionless。尽管作者展示了令人惊叹的思辨力、艺术眼光，还是让大多数读者难以认同。
一些遭受过创伤，有过不幸家庭经历的人很难认同主流的家庭以及爱情观，于是在艺术与写作中寻找慰藉与出路，作者的特殊经历外加天性中自由的因子成就了这么一位情欲大师、情色作家。书中自传部分的内容多姿多彩，比如说芝加哥大学的“猥亵着装舞会”，真是够刺激，不愧是一部“情欲”小说；而哲理部分则论据十足，思维严密，你明明不同意他的观点，却不明就里被那严密的逻辑套进去了。
我给这本书4星，作者写作功底深厚，对文学形式有创新；我不喜欢的地方有两点，一是作者有时候太急于向读者兜售自己的观点了，把各种ideas 全部杂糅进去，致使某些章节布局欠妥；另外就是这部情欲之作虽然观点新奇，时不时让人耳目一新，但论述有fallacy, 作者构建起来的情欲世界对我来说只不过是个性乌托邦，无法令人信服。
书中有主人公艾沙姆小时候受到性侵犯的描写，此外他还有一名性情暴戾的继父，种种因素促成了艾沙姆那惊世骇俗的性道德观。而本书正是对其观念进行辩解的一本书，作者重写了亚当和夏娃的故事，自诩“我们拥有纯粹为了性本身的魅力而享受性生活的能力，也就是说能够在多个性伙伴之间游刃有余”，为情欲正名。难怪有评论质问，为什么只有情欲，没有爱情，作者甚至缺乏正常人的情感，emotionless。尽管作者展示了令人惊叹的思辨力、艺术眼光，还是让大多数读者难以认同。
一些遭受过创伤，有过不幸家庭经历的人很难认同主流的家庭以及爱情观，于是在艺术与写作中寻找慰藉与出路，作者的特殊经历外加天性中自由的因子成就了这么一位情欲大师、情色作家。书中自传部分的内容多姿多彩，比如说芝加哥大学的“猥亵着装舞会”，真是够刺激，不愧是一部“情欲”小说；而哲理部分则论据十足，思维严密，你明明不同意他的观点，却不明就里被那严密的逻辑套进去了。
我给这本书4星，作者写作功底深厚，对文学形式有创新；我不喜欢的地方有两点，一是作者有时候太急于向读者兜售自己的观点了，把各种ideas 全部杂糅进去，致使某些章节布局欠妥；另外就是这部情欲之作虽然观点新奇，时不时让人耳目一新，但论述有fallacy, 作者构建起来的情欲世界对我来说只不过是个性乌托邦，无法令人信服。
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