"What is avoided only for fear of disgrace is already done." Ovid

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"The extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The simple way is the right way. The closer you get to the true, the less waste of expression you experience." Bruce Lee

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"Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it." George Foreman

Improving Pleasure - Broadening the Spectrum

At a party, Nana suddenly embraces the security expert Rothmann. She cannot explain why she foregoes the preliminary civil contact. She forces Rothmann to forego all preliminaries. The two retreat to their hosts' bedroom. This is bilaterally associated with the feeling of the most urgent tenderness. Cosmic intimacy reigns, pure species happiness. The tigers in the jungle do not celebrate an engagement either. They see each other and recognize each other in their beauty.

Broadening the Spectrum - Nana coined words like divination, divination and idiosyncrasies. She read James Joyce and Walt Whitman, happy that her preferences were met with general incomprehension. She read and learned by heart and enjoyed - as if floating - transitions from language to clothing to desire. In the disguises of a student... the gown, the glasses, the ponytail... Nana explored the fringes and heights of her pleasure. 

From Nana's notes

It was only love (male desire is crossed out) that allowed me to experience my body as more than a clothes rack with a signal character that defies trends. Until Kaplan, I had associated my body primarily with hunger and discomfort. I thought of sex with Kaplan as an occupation of our souls. I embraced his spirit in a coat of flesh. In a coat of flesh corresponds to a subsequent ironization. As ravishing and provocative as I appeared to the world, my relationship to my body was a source of sadness. With Kaplan, being naked took on a vehement meaning. I experienced sex with him as a release. Only at this point in my being did I not feel torn apart by all sorts of demands that I could never forget; which tormented me with reports of inadequacy.

At the beginning of our friendship I bought a volume of nude photographs, black and white, what else. Today I understand the meaning of the volume. I - still clumsily - offered Kaplan an expansion of the spectrum. I sensed a scope for eroticism and unconsciously asked for the access authorization code. 

I was suspicious of the effect I had. Everyone found me charming. I was such a damned valuable member of society, even though I couldn't get anything done. I kept returning to Mia. (Mia is Nana's literary alter ego.) I met her in the sailors' home and on a street of my imagination while I was sitting in a lecture hall. I considered a life as a streetwalker. Not that it had ever occurred to me. But Mia was very close to me. I introduced words like divination, divination and idiosyncrasies. I read James Joyce and Walt Whitman, happy that my preferences were met with general incomprehension. I read and learned by heart, and enjoyed the suspended transitions from language to clothing to desire. 

I wrote screenplays for myself. The camera followed me to university; it saw me in an ancient lecture hall. I took down a lecture in bullet points while fellow students eyed me up. My skirt rode up, someone stared at my thighs. Every description ended before the act and was devoid of anything explicit. The rest was off the record. I imagined getting down to business with a man without any preamble and without intimacy. The individual scenes resembled woodcuts and corresponded to conjugations. 

Improving pleasure became my secret main theme. It was combined with improvements in my wardrobe, an interest in valuable jewelry and expensive underwear. The program camouflaged a burning longing for linguistic power. I needed a high-flyer... a language master who would allow me to be explicit. My pleasure depended on it. Sheer self-empowerment, obscenity as an autonomous gesture, the verbally erect middle finger - these meant nothing to me. 

So I understood that the playing space was a resonance space, an arousal amplifier. Someone had to open the door to a room in which I was surprised by happiness. If I were looking for a comparison, I think of a married couple who occasionally stay in a hotel to have sex in an unfamiliar place. The strange smells, thin walls and service change (in an optimistic reading) tried and tested game arrangements to the advantage of the lovers. 

The comparison is too weak. The student I was already aware that she was dependent on monumentality; on a dimension that one denies in daylight. 

In the present day of the novel's events in the first pandemic summer - the Germanist Nana is causing a sensation beyond the professional world with her re-evaluation of a constellation that is not only prominent in literary history. It is thanks to her that we have the evidence that Aurora-Wanda Sacher-Masoch, supposedly the primal mother as dominatrix, played her role - obeying necessity - according to the stage directions of her submissive husband. Nana found her subject via a detour via James Joyce. In Ulysses, the Irish writer composed the married couple Leopold and Molly Bloom based on the Sacher-Masochs. Leopold Bloom is the prototype of the ridiculous man. The final soliloquium of Ulysses, in which Molly babbles without stopping, is considered the pinnacle of female psychology. Nana is about to complete a general reckoning with this interpretation. She exposes the monologue as a conglomeration of clichés that primarily conveys male prejudices. We see her in her boss's office. Professor Blattschneider is the master of language. That is a historic title not only at the Landgrave Philip University in Ederthal. Philip's nickname, the Magnanimous, did not refer to a mild nature, but to great courage. Philip I was the chief armorer of the Reformation and played a key role in suppressing the peasant uprisings. Brecht said that the peasant uprisings were the greatest German misfortune because they happened too early. Our Landgrave did not get involved out of any particular affection for Luther's teachings. He fought against imperial-Catholic claims to parts of Hesse with the Protestant sword.

A bullet to the heart of time

At the moment Nana she enjoys awakening Cornelius' appétit pantagruélique. For him, appetite is not just a gesture of boasting. His desire is a match for a repas gargantuesque. See François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Cornelius' claim to air supremacy is formulated uninhibitedly and uninhibitedly.

Later, she is sitting at her desk, thinkingabout a passage in Stefan Zweig's brilliant insight into the Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Summoned to England by his friends, Erasmus finds shelter in London with his incredibly energetic friend Thomas Morus in 1509. The holder of important offices leads an exemplary existence and an open house. His immediate surroundings resemble a future laboratory. In this sphere, the pastiche In Praise of Folly was created, first published in 1511 "in quarto format".

"The unique and unrepeatable trick of this work is a brilliant mummery: Erasmus does not speak himself to say all the bitter truths that he thinks the powerful of this earth should tell, but instead he sends Stultitia, foolishness, to the podium so that she can praise herself. This creates an amusing qui pro quo." Stefan Zweig

The galling genius 

Erasmus blocks the way to a clear classification. The question of who says what obscures the subversive reason for what is said. The author protects himself from the Inquisition with incredible skill. Zweig recognizes a "sovereign mask art". He speaks of a "core shot into the heart of the age, delivered with a completely loose, merely playful hand". The author shows his hero as a diagnostician who has become bitter and galling before the "doors of the powerful", but who is untouched by any rebellious impulse.

In subsequent editions, Erasmus comments on the work. He describes actual and alleged intentions and explains that his "praise" as a whole "should be read as a pedagogical text" (Sandra Langereis). 

The pamphlet hits a nerve. Many believers condemn the licentiousness of Renaissance clergy and demand a church reform according to the wording of the four Gospels. They oppose the "abuse of the relic trade and the nonsense of indulgences". Erasmus exposes the rulers without coming out of hiding. He pleads for a "renaissance of religion". In this way, he becomes a mastermind of the Reformation. At the same time, he fears a schism. We admire Erasmus' ability to hide himself with words. He says things with impunity that no one else can dare to say.