August 7, 2006 from Morning Edition (JOHN HENDREN reporting)

This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.

I’ve spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables.

I didn’t believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must’ve been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flyer directing groceries how to display their food.

Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might — to the profoundly repressed — suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.

Beth – As far as I know, the NPR reporter was the sole source of that story, though I admit I didn’t try every possible Google combination. I’ll see if I can find anything else on the Academic Universe (formerly Lexis/Nexis) database.

Has anyone checked out the original story about the vegetable vendor being put to death? I saw the reference too – but I wonder, is it really true? Certainly could be – but – wow.

And, damn, I haven’t read the Bakhtan, so can’t participate in this discussion as I would like to. But I have delved into the abject through Kristeva, which isn’t quite the grotesque body, but the body of illness, that leaks, has pus, sores, smells. Not quite sexuality, mind you. Though in a piece of work I used those notions of the abject body when speaking about the baggy, bleeding post partum body, which sort of is sex taken to its fruit. Oh, my, my puns aren’t working today!

There are so many “bodies,” and ways of understanding the bode has shifted through history. Laqueur wrote a great book on gynaecological drawings for genital anatomy and showed how for long periods a woman’s vagina was considered an inversion of a penis. Now that would make a most interesting tomato!

It seems, from what you written, that Bakhtin was speaking perhaps more about a ‘sociological body’ than one, say, of private eroticism, or the body we cleanse in the bathroom. The body as it complies to social norms, both fulfulling social expectations and propogating those kinds of social constructions. It’s a complicated body for sure! As Teju mentions, that body is flayed about in the media with “sanitized sex and eroticized violence.”

My personal preference in “body talk” is the body, which we really can’t know, through the various ‘systems’ we have defined: circulatory, nerves, meridians, Chi, whatever, composed of billions of cells subject to electro-chemical processes that are pure wizardry. That the body is a transducer, a relay station, that sexual and erotic and social and violent and deathly impulses flash through it, through us. I love Braidotti on this, if I may include a lengthy quote:

With reference to molecular biology, genetics and neurology – to mention just a few – the body today can and should be described…also as a sensor; an integrated site of information networks….a messenger carrying thousands of communication systems: cardio-vascular, respiratory, visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, hormonal, psychic, emotional, erotics, etc. Coordinated by an inimitable circuit of information transmission, the body is a living recording system, capable of sorting and then retrieving the necessary information and to process it at such speed that it can react ‘instinctively.’ Fundamentally prone to pleasure, the embodied subject tends towards the recollection and repetition of experiences which pleasure has ‘fixed’ psychically and sensually upon the subject (to re-member, after all, is to re-peat and repetition tends to favour that which gave joy and not that which gave pain). The body is not only multi-functional but also in some ways multi-lingual: it speaks through temperature, motion, speed, emotions, excitement that affects the cardiac rhythm and the likes. “http://www.chairetmetal.com/cm06/braidotti-complet.htm

Genetically altered tomatoes anyone? :grins:

Recently a venue in London hosted a masturbation marathon, for example.

Sex meets competitive athleticism — reminds me of that poem by Sharon Olds I linked to a little while back.

I’m glad to hear that well-endowed tomatoes are popping up other places. Someone should start a Freaks of Nature Blog Carnival!

Teju – I’ve actually toyed with the idea of writing a book on Duerer. Interesting guy.

“life is in the process of figuring itself out” – so the fundamentalist opposition to evolution relates to this too! Good lord.