Mar 5, 2021

"I love you...Me neither" (updated)

 If you're old enough, you'll remember the eternal French words "Je t'aime...Moi non plus", spoken by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, in what...let's look this up...in 1969 (meaning you possibly won't (remember)).

But we got struck by this not so jugendfreie poster on the internet...

We added the fig-leaves after having read a beautiful essay in The New Yorker about Nabokov's Lolita 

...and feel encouraged to engage in another act of self-promotion by invoking our novel "Green Eyes", which--regular readers of this blog may have come to regret--is always about everything, and so it's also about this song...

We're in Chapter 17 of the GREEN EYES, and the whole thing is NOT jugendfrei at all, so you'll read this at your own risk. John, the narrator, and Alex, the lead character, have met once before, and now they meet again--in Johns bed: 

We’re back in the bedroom. We finally embrace, kiss. This is it, this is the moment. Should Alex expect me to sink to my knees now, unbutton his fly, like in the porn flicks? Or unzip his zipper, most porn flicks are so cheap, they don’t have money for the more expensive, button-holed Levis—-unzip his cheaper jeans and start caressing his briefs with my lips, drawing the attention to his budding tumescence under the cotton? 
Well, I might, at least in the sense that my bedroom looks almost as bad as the motel rooms where those flicks are shot. A chest, two wooden bedside tables, two wooden chairs. A timber-framed bed done in cherry imitation, a mattress and dirty sheets, a discordant collection of things that speak of my financial (and mental) condition. 
Yet Alex isn’t waiting for the cotton kiss (besides, he doesn’t wear any fly-enhanced leg-wear but is still clad in his hospital sweatpants). Instead, he undresses unceremoniously. T-shirt, pants, briefs, shoes, socks are all arranged into a neat pile on the second chair. 
He climbs onto the bed, folds himself into some relaxed, unassuming position, like a model in a drawing class, but without the attitude. The simplicity of his movements I will never forget, they changed my life.
I follow his example and make an unusual effort at apparel-folding. Although we had fairly rough sex the previous morning, there is not the least suggestion of anything untoward between us in the past, for all practical purposes we could be virgins. I lie next to him. 
“You’re beautiful,” he says, caressing my face. I’m caressing back. This would be the moment to say ‘I love you,’ although you never know what you get back, like ‘moi non plus,’ statistically the most honest answer (moi non plus, French, used by Serge Gainsbourg, the one and only basis for his fame, this noun phrase, meaning “me neither”), or ‘I love you too,’ but uttered unconvincingly, or ‘I love you too,’ uttered more convincingly, although you know it’s bullshit.

(I hold back.)

(I cannot hold back.)

“I love you,” I say.

“No sweat,” Alex comes back—-bypassing world literature from Homer to Spielberg. Have you ever heard anybody saying ‘no sweat’ in this situation? There’s a teasing movement of his eyelashes, although his green eyes stay neutral as if it’s head or tail. “In human sexual behavior,” he says, “foreplay is a set of emotionally and physically intimate acts between two or more people meant to create desire for sexual activity and sexual arousal.” Ooh, he’s so sweet!

(There's more educational content below, first the self-promotion:)


Green Eyes
"Click"

(And now the educational stuff:)


 

 (And the lyrics:)

Je t'aime, je t'aime
Oh oui, je t'aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
Comme la vague irrésolue
Je vais, je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Et je me retiens
Je t'aime, je t'aime
Oh oui, je t'aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
Tu es la vague, moi l'île nue
Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Et je te rejoins
Je t'aime, je t'aime
Oh oui, je t'aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
Comme la vague irrésolue
Je vais, je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Et je me retiens
Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens
Entre


1 comment:

Svetlana said...

Writing a literature review for research isn't a really difficult job. One key aspect of any literature review is how well the question is answered.

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