Aug 7, 2015 06:32 PM
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/bywater_08_15.php
Book: "Naked at Lunch: The Adventures of a Reluctant Nudist"; by Mark Haskell Smith
Review: Michael Bywater
EXCERPT: [...] We should perhaps try to clarify naked versus nude. Naked is what you are when you haven't got your clothes on. Nude is what you are when you have, with intent, taken your clothes off. [...] It invites the very sexual speculation it claims to obliterate. It also implies the presence of a witness; and perhaps the transgression of public nudism is that there are multiple witnesses whose consent has not been sought.
I saw this in action when I was about eight. We went for a day to the nudist colony on Le Levant [...] It was nice to be in the warm Mediterranean [...] My father, a doctor, was happy surrounded by nude (or, to him, just naked) people for him to inspect for defects or warning signs. My mother, on the other hand, was British. She would not remove her bathing costume [...] All day a steady stream of naked men diverted oh-so-casually to pass close by her. [...]
Mark Haskell Smith is no nudist or naturist, or devotee of Freikörperkultur, nor is he interested in screwing other people's wives, which, anyway, the serious nudists all deny ever happens. But it does. I once did a radio programme on a nudist club alarmingly called Eureka in the alarmingly named Pennis Wood near the alarmingly named village of Fawkham [...]
[...] There are diverting wonders here. Nudists all seem obsessed with writing manifestos. Charles Richter, inventor of the earthquake-measuring scale, was a nudist. The guy who spearheaded the stamping out of nudist beaches round San Francisco is called Wiener. Haskell Smith goes on a nudist cruise with 3,732 naked buttocks on one boat. He goes to Palm Springs and the majestically depraved Cap d'Agde in France, not to mention Heliopolis on Le Levant. He goes to Florida - old people, sun - to find the American Nudist Research Library. At one point he finds himself in Vera Playa, Spain, in Frankie's, a bar festooned with nudists and run by a British expat called Alan. You can picture the rest.
And the original nudists themselves: what a bunch. Take Englishman Edward Carpenter, a 19th-century gay sandal-wearing vegetarian, friend of Walt Whitman, Isadora Duncan and D H Lawrence. Or the dreadful German Richard Ungewitter, who said nudism would help eugenics because you could tell if someone was really blond.
But Haskell Smith's slightly jokey narrative of harmless cranks partly disguises the bewildering complexity of our relationship with our bodies, our clothes, and others' bodies and their clothes. People are killed for wearing the 'wrong' clothes [...] think of Sophie Lancaster, beaten to death in a park in 2007 for dressing as a goth. People ridicule and often loathe the Hasidim for dressing as if they were in 18th-century Latvia. There may well be reasons to consider them schlemiels, bullies and trombeniks, but their clothes aren't a valid one. But if your dress code breaks mine, then put 'em up, pal. It's nearly universal....
Book: "Naked at Lunch: The Adventures of a Reluctant Nudist"; by Mark Haskell Smith
Review: Michael Bywater
EXCERPT: [...] We should perhaps try to clarify naked versus nude. Naked is what you are when you haven't got your clothes on. Nude is what you are when you have, with intent, taken your clothes off. [...] It invites the very sexual speculation it claims to obliterate. It also implies the presence of a witness; and perhaps the transgression of public nudism is that there are multiple witnesses whose consent has not been sought.
I saw this in action when I was about eight. We went for a day to the nudist colony on Le Levant [...] It was nice to be in the warm Mediterranean [...] My father, a doctor, was happy surrounded by nude (or, to him, just naked) people for him to inspect for defects or warning signs. My mother, on the other hand, was British. She would not remove her bathing costume [...] All day a steady stream of naked men diverted oh-so-casually to pass close by her. [...]
Mark Haskell Smith is no nudist or naturist, or devotee of Freikörperkultur, nor is he interested in screwing other people's wives, which, anyway, the serious nudists all deny ever happens. But it does. I once did a radio programme on a nudist club alarmingly called Eureka in the alarmingly named Pennis Wood near the alarmingly named village of Fawkham [...]
[...] There are diverting wonders here. Nudists all seem obsessed with writing manifestos. Charles Richter, inventor of the earthquake-measuring scale, was a nudist. The guy who spearheaded the stamping out of nudist beaches round San Francisco is called Wiener. Haskell Smith goes on a nudist cruise with 3,732 naked buttocks on one boat. He goes to Palm Springs and the majestically depraved Cap d'Agde in France, not to mention Heliopolis on Le Levant. He goes to Florida - old people, sun - to find the American Nudist Research Library. At one point he finds himself in Vera Playa, Spain, in Frankie's, a bar festooned with nudists and run by a British expat called Alan. You can picture the rest.
And the original nudists themselves: what a bunch. Take Englishman Edward Carpenter, a 19th-century gay sandal-wearing vegetarian, friend of Walt Whitman, Isadora Duncan and D H Lawrence. Or the dreadful German Richard Ungewitter, who said nudism would help eugenics because you could tell if someone was really blond.
But Haskell Smith's slightly jokey narrative of harmless cranks partly disguises the bewildering complexity of our relationship with our bodies, our clothes, and others' bodies and their clothes. People are killed for wearing the 'wrong' clothes [...] think of Sophie Lancaster, beaten to death in a park in 2007 for dressing as a goth. People ridicule and often loathe the Hasidim for dressing as if they were in 18th-century Latvia. There may well be reasons to consider them schlemiels, bullies and trombeniks, but their clothes aren't a valid one. But if your dress code breaks mine, then put 'em up, pal. It's nearly universal....
