 Multiple choice on scantron sheets  worth 15% of your term’s mark  “This will be a question multiple-choice exam to be sat during a class period. It will ask fact-based questions and questions that ask you to apply some of the techniques we have studied in basic ways. It will be very easy if you have been coming to class regularly.”  Any Questions? The Mid-Term Exam

The Sacred and the Profane II: SHIT GETS REAL Starring: bride bridegroom chorus narrator Marcelle Simone Sir Edmund eggs eyeballs bull testicles Rape! ~ Murder!! ~ Mayhem!!!

 One of the most famous and enduring erotic works ever  wedding songs between bride and bridegroom with chorus intervening (role of reader)  in modern Judaism it is sung at Passover, the start of the grain harvest  allegorically read as relationship between God and His people or God and the Church  rare for its biblical celebration of sex and sexuality  not unlike another poem we have – the Wedding of Inanni and Dumuzi (Sumerian wedding poem) The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)

 several movements, taking us from invitation/flirting to consummation  highly stylized and ritualized – this is formulaic and preparatory to real love making  not dissimilar to today – the toast to the bride, the declarations of love, the oaths and vows  all of which is erotically charged  other examples of erotically charged elements in weddings? The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)

 erotic wedding rituals:

The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)  erotic wedding rituals:

The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)  erotic wedding rituals:

The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)  erotic wedding rituals:

The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)  erotic wedding rituals:

The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)  erotic wedding rituals:

 gradually more and more erotically charged language  chapters 1-3 are foreplay  chapter 4 is praise and immediate precursor to pleasure  chapters 5-8 are erotic encounter, hit and miss, feinting, faltering, almost unbearable with temptation  last half of chapter 8 is detumescence, denouement The Song of Songs biblical (c. 3 rd century BCE)

 Heine – German romantic poet  last years spent in Paris  often censored for political elements in his work  a lot of his poems set to music by R. Strauss, Schumann, others – Lieder Song of Songs Heinrich Heine ( ) “Music played at weddings always reminds me of the music played for soldiers before they go into battle.” – Heinrich Heine

 this poem is a poem of praise for the biblical Song of Songs  playing a quadruple game  praising God’s creation of women  praising God’s writing of the Song of Songs  himself writing a poem that mimics the eroticism of the biblical Song of Songs  and promising to study the subject – women’s bodies and sex – until he can write as well as God  takes the eros of the biblical song and elevates it Song of Songs Heinrich Heine ( )

 what’s at stake then is again the aesthetic  words, language, form, rhyme, structure = pleasure  poetic form and artistic form have parallels in sensual form  the poem becomes a seduction, the words a body, the pleasure of the text = the pleasure of the sext Song of Songs Heinrich Heine ( )

The Sextual Pleasures of Reading

 French intellectual, anthropologist, writer, economist, sociologist, philosopher  initially a big fan of surrealism  interested in human sacrifice, ritual, expenditure  pure loss, pleasure, total commitment  potlatch, human sacrifice, orgasm, annihilation The Story of the Eye Georges Bataille ( )