February 11, 201214 yr Active Members I am reading Edmund White's latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend. Before the friend gets greatly involved, Jack dates Peter, a ballet dancer. When Peter returns from 2 weeks of touring, he gets a massage by Jack, who uses patchouli-scented oil. So he massages Peter, and then this passage struck my attention: Then Jack's big, octave-and-a-half hands fanned out over Peter's high buttocks and molded them into Silly Putty shapes. But from time to time Jack was forced to stop and sit back and look at what God and the individual will and institutional discipline had wrought. He remembered that a philosophy professor in Ann Arbor had said that vision was the most spiritual sense and smelling the most animal; Jack went back and forth from gazing at Peter's ass with angelic indifference to spreading his cheeks and grazing his hole with his thumb and bringing it up to his nose with canine rapture. He thought that this blend of patchouli and boy mud was the most intoxicating scent, the true smell of modernity. Jack knew nothing about hippies,incense or drugs, but he suspected that dozens of skinny, bearded guys on the Lower East Side were stretching out their male friends at this very moment, burning doss sticks and working their thumbs into unwashed curry-chutes. He could picture the imprint of an oily body on the bedticking thrown unto the floor...the smell of the sixties: ass and incense. Jack told himself that he wasn't really gay.
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