The 120 Days of Sodom

There's a Luis Buñuel movie called Lodge Door.

There's a scene in that where the 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade book, has now ended and the door opens and there's an announcer like, let's see who survived.

And the first person who walks out is Jesus.

Ha ha ha! And they burn the theater down.

um poor people do not get to you know participate in the elevation of one kind of art or another except in so far as they will stick something on their walls um usually at a much reduced rate from the sort of money that's being exchanged for you know high art as it's usually understood so it's worth mentioning that here in the surrealist world Most of these artists, Man Ray included, often had a really rocky start.

Like the Impressionists before them, these are iconoclastic painters and photographers and artists who were very much aggressively attacking the conventions of the art world at the time, for one reason or another, either by using photography for purposes other than photography is usually used for, like overlaying multiple images on one another, artificially creating the images in one way, or by framing them in a different way, as Man Ray did with this monument to the Marquis de Sade, which Penguin then rather ironically or perhaps appropriately adopted for the cover of their version of the 120 Days of Sodom.

I actually used this image not just because I wanted to point out the, you know, capitalist sort of reversal here, but also because this was very much the best version of the monument to De Sade that I could find.

Like, it was important in Nadia Chowch's book, but I honestly could not find a better picture on the internet that wasn't, you know, either copyrighted or complicated or something like So yes, this is actually what, like, Man Ray photographed.

De Sade was himself kind of an artist of the 18th century who was engaged in, like, novels that were aggressively countercultural.

De Sade famously is the guy whose name then became the term for sadism.

In the 120 Days of Sodom, as well as some of his other writings like Justine, the Marquis de Sade argues that sexual aggression and sexual dominance are um, is morally acceptable.

explores the sort of depravity of human sexuality, which made him an important symbol for the Surrealists, and for Man Ray in particular.

I think most people have.

Wrote many philosophical works, including portions of his book, 120 Days of Sodom.

While imprisoned in the Bastille and other fortresses, he spent much of his adult life in prison and wrote most of his novels there.

His sexually explicit narratives were composed to fill the tedious hours and to compensate for the absence of women.

Delegates must present all planned reading material for inspection during conference security spot checks.

This will avoid last year's scare when a troublemaking delegate out to cause mischief was found to have concealed a copy of Women Who Wouldn't Whisht within a harmless large format pop-up edition of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom.

The delegate was swiftly apprehended before any further damage could be done and is now undergoing aversion therapy at one of our retraining facilities.

In keeping with recent Scottish Government advice on healthy eating and that of its partners in the sector, of course, I'm reliably informed the party could trial a new AI model which will deploy cutting-edge retina scanning technology to detect traces of delinquent foodstuffs having been consumed in the last 24 hours.

Mm-hmm.

And in the "120 Days of Sodom," I do not recommend it.

Do not read it, dear public, dear, dear readers.

But w- one of the interesting things in there is how m- much blasphemy there is.