Satyricon USA

By Eurydice. Scribner, $22.

American culture, which shamelessly glorifies and manipulates sex as a panacea has simultaneously glorified and lauded the Puritanical repression of sexual desireand sexual expression. Where else in the world are you able to view MTV-style "public service messages" that sell safe sex to teens with a soft-core format? Where else does sexual identity -- male, female, gay, straight, bi, trans, celibate -- so thoroughly define the individual?

In this culture it's not surprising that the voice of clarity belongs to an outsider. Eurydice, the author of Satyricon USA, has fashioned a truly insightful look at the conundrums, contradictions and kinks forming the rich, steaming stew of American sexual culture. Modeled after the first-century Roman Petronius' supposedly metaphorical memoirs, this Satyricon takes the reader across a rather sordid landscape where sex is commodified, tabulated, celebrated, hidden away and, most pathetically and most very truthfully, mistaken for love.

Born in Greece, Eurydice ran away from home at age 14, headed for Hollywood stardom. She made it as far as New York's Greenwich Village. Academics was her refuge and she became a perpetual student, accumulating scholarships and degrees to forestall the alternative -- life in the American workforce. Somewhere in there, an award-winning novel, f/32, was published and translated around the world. Eventually, Bob Guccione Jr. lured her from the ivory tower, and Eurydice found herself writing the wild side, first for Spin and now as Gear magazine's monthly sex columnist.

What sets Eurydice's viewpoint apart from the usual catalog of titillation and prurient self-conscious shock is as complex as the subject matter. Liberally dosed with epigrams from such disparate sources as Wittgenstein, Sappho, current movies, Goethe, Whitman, strip-club customers and Shakespeare, the text plunges into the sexual worlds Americans have created. While visiting familiar territory for anyone with experience, vicarious or otherwise, Satyricon USA also visits some startling places from which we have heard few voices. From mortuaries to the military, from the Vatican to outer space, Eurydice elicits stories from people who live in sexual spaces most of us do not even imagine exist. Her personal involvement with her subject and her sources allows Satyricon USA to become a document that reaches beyond the S&M dungeons and strip-club runways.

Vicarious thrills are few, however. Whatever Eurydice brought to the subject, whatever it cost her intellectually and psychically to immerse herself in these worlds, the impact of the book is shattering. Where else might we read the tender lamentations of a quiet, LA Goth-girl necrophiliac as she demurely explains her rituals?

"I don't see my sexuality as a violation of the dead; I see it as a gift to them. Because we value longevity and health so much, the dead are untouchable in our society, like lepers. We're afraid to associate with them because we're afraid their death will rub off on us... I feel my life confirmed when I kiss a dead man..."

Where else could one listen to a Cincinnati surgeon/satyr justify his long string of conquests as his own self-confidence begins to crumble around him?

"Without this pursuit of sex, I'd be celebrating my suburban death right now. Sex is a validation. Maybe I do it so people will say, 'You're a good guy, you fuck well.' I know my work goals 12 years ahead. I know the 10 days I have off in the next two years. With sex, I'm allowed to be unpredictable. My daily life needs an element of chaos."

Unafraid to make judgments and unwilling to pass by a subject, Eurydice has fashioned a mirror in which both reader and author are reflected. Satyricon USA is a text in which source and subject and audience all may find ourselves connected by strands of longing, of desire, of yearning and even of love that are tangled and contradictory, that are strong and dark and deep and fragile and, often, incredibly sad.



Advocate/Weekly: What brought you to write about sexual culture in the United States?

Eurydice: Fate. I wrote a novel called f/32. It was a story about a vagina, long before anything like it was done. I went to India for two years. ... I was in the desert with a maharajah shooting a documentary on possessed women, women possessed with variations of Satan. I got a telex from Boulder telling me the book was going to come out. I got really sick in India and came back to Brown [University] and started teaching on the strength of my academics and thought my life would go on as a professor. Then, I got a call from Spin magazine where a friend from Brown was the editor-in-chief at the time. I go have lunch with [former owner] Bob Guccione Jr. ... He saw the book had a sexual content, so there it went. He gave me a job as a staff writer, quite extraordinary, because ... I had never read any nonfiction nor planned to. But, hey, I thought, anything beats having to teach forever after. I'm young enough to ride this train.

The first piece I wrote for him cost him $300,000 in ads and also his most consistent advertisers. The Army, Ford Motor Co., I forget who else, said if I ever published again in the magazine they would not advertise in the issue I was in. That article became a chapter in [Satyricon USA], the bloodletting, the lesbians cutting each other and what not ["San Francisco: Blood Simple Babes"]. There were some really telling photographs of these people. I don't think advertising executives read but they saw those photographs.

So, I had this monthly paycheck but wrote very little for Spin. The second thing I wrote was the piece on the Vatican, which is now in the book ["American Abroad: Virgins at Heart"]. The Catholic League denounced me. I was very sincerely an innocent going about having no clue what the rest of the world thought about things. I thought it was obvious. I mean, everybody knows about the Catholic Church.

I got an offer from Scribner's to make a book out of this sort of thing. It was a good enough advance, I thought, OK, I could do it on the side and do my own fiction. It would be a great way to finance my own work, but it didn't work out this way. I got completely consumed by this project. It became Sisyphean, an albatross.

Advocate/Weekly: Can you describe the journey this project required of you?

Eurydice: It was a very exhausting, seemingly endless journey psychically. In some ways it was very satiating. I have been very much an adventurer in my life, very much a traveler. After this, I was ready to pull back and become a misanthrope.

What it took to get people to speak about things that were so private ... was to become them, to become one of them, to speak their language, to enter their world. Very often I moved into their houses. I would meet them and I would stay with a member of their community.

I would have to tap the same impulses. I would have to share with them my understanding in myself and my own related memories, something as extreme as bloodletting or necrophilia, or otherwise I would be on the outside looking in and they would know it.

It was a very difficult and confusing and time-consuming project. My soul became their soul and became more and more weighed by their questions and impasses and needs.

Then, when I would separate, I would come out of that world. I would have to put it aside because I felt as if I couldn't even breathe on my own anymore. And then I would go back and transcribe everything. We're talking about tape upon tape upon tape, hundreds and hundreds of hours. I had like 900 pages of this book. Then I would have to cut and paste, get rid of people, combine characters, and try to be very true to them. Then there was a state where I realized where I would have to have a character that would kind of represent me but it's not really -- otherwise it would not be readable. So, then I came back in as an "I," as a narrator, and became judgmental where I had not been judgmental before. That was for me, personally, the most difficult and upsetting aspect [of the project].

Advocate/Weekly: Most journalists would struggle to keep that "I," those judgments out of a text, to maintain the facade of detached observation, and you're telling us it was a struggle to inject that judgmental point of view.

Eurydice: On a very superficial level, I found I was betraying these people, that I was betraying a certain trust and confidence by even printing what they said and by in some way, in any way, commenting on it. I did not like myself for doing it.

I found that I had to have a kind of common ground with the average reader, keep that consistent throughout, and then very subtly change my point of view in the hope that I would also shift the reader's point of view into becoming more accepting and open. That was extremely difficult, perhaps because I don't believe that there is a norm, that there is an average, anything except statistics and statistics are very temporary. Right now we feel a certain way about whatever, about homosexuality; 10 years ago we felt different; 10 years from now we may feel differently. None of that is normal.

It made me become personae, in the plural. It was not fiction. In fiction, it is very easy to do because it's kind of accepted, everyone knows what you're trying to do unless you're Philip Roth or something. I found limitations in nonfiction that are not acknowledged in public that much -- you've got to mold the truth as much as we mold it in fiction -- with much more respect and with many more obvious limits because everything that is in quotes is in quotes. But, outside that, you have to mold your material so that it becomes the convention of a book, a readable article. Reality is not at all readable or simple. I'm still not convinced that the result is up to par. I think that my own misgivings, my own tendency toward multiplicity and openness and complexity shows through despite my efforts to control everything and might have hurt the end result.

Advocate/Weekly: Have you maintained relationships with any of the people you met?

Eurydice: No. I couldn't. Many of them wanted to, but I felt that I couldn't do justice to the book if I had personal contact with these people. There are quite a few people, half a dozen, who became acquaintances or even friends, but I ended up not writing about them because of that.

That was a line I drew from the beginning. I won't write about the people I slept with, I won't talk about my own -- I give tiny little hints here and there just to show that [the character] is not uptight. I did not write about my own partaking of any of these sexual [encounters] -- I wanted to keep myself very much the observer.

Advocate/Weekly: What about the material that didn't make it into the book?

Eurydice: A lot that I didn't write was equally memorable as the stuff I did write. I stayed with a Mennonite family and an Amish bishop's family. I talked to Hassidic lesbians and transsexuals who had the same Hassidic clients every day in the meat-packing district [of New York City].

Some stories were too much. I stayed with a coven of witches, people who used witchcraft for their own sexual purposes. I tried to trace the story of a family, the sexual experiences of three or four generations of a family. But all of those were either not full enough to justify a chapter or they were too esoteric or they were boring.

Advocate/Weekly: The book's title is Satyricon USA. In what ways are these uniquely American stories? Is this part of a series? Are you going to do Satyricon France, Satyricon Japan....?

Eurydice: No, no, no. There is a specific sort of inconsistency, a schizoid relationship with sexuality in America that I haven't met anywhere else. Somehow at the same time, this is the most liberated and the most repressed nation and each person has both facets within -- there is a lot of judgment and self-hatred. At the same time, there is so much room for self-expression, experimentation and all kinds of little communities and worlds.

There is so much judgment and emphasis placed on one's sexuality. In Europe, people who are into S&M are into S&M. You and your spouse buy a few toys and bind each other and that's it. But you don't join a society, pay your dues, go to the clubs. And that's because it's fine, it's a fun thing to do, and that's the end of it. Here, it becomes almost a religion.

Sex very easily takes the place of community, faith, race, all of the things that elsewhere are one's defining aspects. India is a very repressed society but, in a way, is also very free under pressure. The women are never anorexic or bulimic or have psychological problems of the magnitude you find here. People are very open sexually... and according to the community, can have orgies or whatever, sexual holy days. All of that is considered normal. There is freedom and there is freedom. American freedom, in all its greatness, can be very confusing or restricting or painful sometimes.

Advocate/Weekly: What do you feel you accomplished with this project?

Eurydice: I don't know. It wouldn't be mine to know, to decide. Perhaps 20 years from now I could answer that question.

I know what I tried to achieve. I tried to put together a book on a subject that is sensational, superficial and transitional as sex really is in America today and make it as much of a classic, a long-lasting portrait of a moment of time in a place, as I could. In the process, as we do year after year in life, I found out more about who I am and what I am not capable of so I won't try it again.

Eurydice

In addition to her mixed media artwork, Eurydice Kamvisseli has published books and made documentary films in India. Presently she is working in collage, using embroidery as a medium, and is an Artist-in-Residence at the ArtCenter/South Florida.

An interview with Eurydice:

Subject matter in your artwork?
The relationship of the female body to history, propaganda, power, entertainment, and eroticism. The relationship of the female to the male gaze. Revealing the truth of it through the layers. My subject matter removes layers of cultural construct. I try to recombine these elements in a way that adds depth and shows the inner workings of the system, that whole system of propaganda, turning it inside out, to see how it controls you. My work asserts the coexistence of power and desire, exposure and elusiveness, and reclaims the complexity of the feminine experience.

Words and typeface?
I use words in all of my visual work. I use text of some kind. All the work comments on some aspect of the culture. The words add that necessary layer to turn the screws, obfuscate and clarify. The visual work comments on the language at the same time the language comments on the visual work. I’m trying to reveal that the image vocabulary could be replaced by words to the same effect. The composition, where the words go, is very important.
Every work has a textual message intended to ‘translate’ the women into generic language, while they pose mutely. Some texts are in dead tongues salvaged in fragments excavated out of the Egyptian desert, some are political slogans and some are advertisements. I use text as street graffiti, the in-your-face art form of which embroidery is the closeted twin.

Creative process?
It starts at the mystical and intuitive even impulsive level and I allow myself to be consumed by that, this urge and inspiration to make something. It’s not a vision so much as something that comes from the heart, I believe in the muse. The artist is a vessel. You have to stop being yourself as the world knows you in order to create. It’s an out of character experience. My actual thinking comes in at a much later time.
I usually find the images first. I usually spread out a lot of posters and arrange them on paper again and again and again. Then I come up with words. And then the last stage is stitching over them. It’s unpredictable.
I am a dangerous artist, where I feel I have to work where I’m at risk, that high or fear is what excites me in my work, slightly threatening. It starts with me. I have to overcome the bonds I’ve inherited. A lot of it started with being born on Lesbos. I was a Lesbian woman. That relationship with that word affected my sense of self. Sexuality became my metaphor of choice at that young age.

Symbols?
Overall, the vagina and then the female body around it, by extension, is a central symbol in my work. The vagina and the eyes. The forbidden is very central. One should not be uncovered is very central, a very central motivation. Other than that I have little fetishes, like Brigitte Bardot and Charlotte Rampling, adolescent fetishes of mine that bring me back to my adolescence.

Mythology?
I use mythological references in all my work to get away from the pop culture element. To give substance and space to a piece. I always think in mythic terms and I consider the work mythic, which is often reflected in the title. My work is very Greek; you can see the mythology there. Every character becomes a god or a myth. I have an interest in reusing the ancients, redoing what the ancients did.