I am grateful to Robert for drawing my attention to a new book. The hard book will come in March; I'm not sure about the limp edition. Sales are expected to hold firm.

The book, reviewed in the New Criterion, which estimable organ....

The thrust of the book .... oh, stop it, stop it.

The book is by Murat Aydermir - why hide 'em anywhere else? - and is called:

Images of Bliss
Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning

Isn't it good that there's no "and"? The subject is far too important to stick an and in. Ooops, there I go again...

In Images of Bliss, Murat Aydemir undertakes an original and extensive analysis of images of male orgasm and semen. In a series of detailed case studies—Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals; Andres Serrano’s use of bodily fluids in his art; paintings by Holbein and Leonardo; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; hard-core pornography (both straight and gay); and key texts from the poststructuralist canon, including Lacan on the phallus....

Whose? That's what I want to know.

...Lacan on the phallus, Bataille on expenditure....

Expenditure? It's an accountancy book. Let's hope he gets his double entry right.

...Lacan on the phallus, Bataille on expenditure, Barthes on bliss, and Derrida on dissemination—Aydemir traces the complex and often contradictory possibilities for imagination, description, and cognition that both the idea and the reality of semen make available. In particular, he foregrounds the significance of male ejaculation for masculine subjectivity. More often than not, Aydemir argues, the event or object of ejaculation emerges as the instance through which identity, meaning, and gender are not so much affirmed as they are relentlessly and productively questioned, complicated, and displaced.

Combining close readings of diverse works with subtle theoretical elaboration and a keen eye for the cultural ideals and anxieties attached to sexuality, Images of Bliss offers a convincing and long overdue critical exploration of ejaculation in Western culture.

And its shortcomings, of course. Have I milked this one enough?