Topical Guide 306
Mark Dorset
Erotic Jewelry: The “Watchcase Wonder”
“THIS IS — this is — astonishing, Herb,” said Ben, on the first of Herb’s visits. In his hand he held one of Herb’s prototypes.
This one, the first Herb had created since his marriage to Lorna, represented something quite new. It set a style that would define the course of development for animated coarse goods for nearly two decades. Inside a silver case, very much like the case of a pocket watch, a tiny couple was couched. Slowly, very slowly, Ben twisted the stem and observed the couple’s performance. What the couple did as Ben turned the stem was affectionate, inventive, clever, difficult, and surprising.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 9
From the “Nothing New Under the Sun” department:
Kraft has said, in several interviews, that he thought he had invented animated erotic jewelry, especially the “watchcase wonder,” and that he was astonished when people came to readings of Herb ’n’ Lorna wearing, or brandishing, examples that predated the book.
The following images are of an “Erotic 18 Karat Rose Gold Pocket Watch” that was listed on 1stDibs with an asking price of $22,850.
The details of the listing give the date of manufacture as “circa 1900,” and describe the timepiece thusly:
Exuding elegance and sophistication, this seemingly understated Swiss quarter-hour repeater pocket watch holds a racy surprise. While a simple white enamel and Roman numeral face tells the time and an innocuous, understated shield motif is beautifully engraved on the 18K rose gold case, the interior conceals a slightly naughtier tableau of a man and two women caught in the act. The automaton trio are hidden behind the cuvette and operate with a repeater function controlled by turning the crown. The manufacture of watches with erotic designs such as this began in the 17th century when they were particularly sought after in the Chinese market. Typically concealed from immediate view on the case back, the racy motifs depicted figures in all manner of undress and intimate situations. By the 18th century, the popularity of exotic watches spread across Europe, India and more recently the Middle East. Only a handful of skill horologists crafted these timepieces, and the present example is also a shining example of Swiss watchmaking. Today, these risqué pocket watches remain popular among timepiece connoisseurs, as well as collectors of vintage erotica.
Language: “Body Language” and “Kinesics”
Style
Herb colored, and he chuckled to try to hide his embarrassment. Ideas came to him from his imagination, from his dreams and daydreams, from that never-ending lust that a man feels for the girls of his youth, and from observations of women around Babbington. He might notice in a woman a certain way of walking, say a certain swing of the hips, and see it as a manifestation of the woman’s peculiar style, just as one might recognize in the use of a certain blue or a certain recognizable brush stroke a manifestation of a painter’s style, or recognize in the frequent use of a certain grammatical technique a certain manner of thought that underlies a writer’s style. While Herb observed the woman’s walk, he made some inferences about her style, and he asked himself some interesting questions: How would that style show up in the woman’s lovemaking? How would it affect her movements in bed? Such pleasant speculations occupied Herb for many hours every day; they were the salacious equivalent of the kind of speculation that helped make him such a superb salesman …Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 9
Kinesics is the interpretation of body motion communication such as facial expressions and gestures, nonverbal behavior related to movement of any part of the body or the body as a whole. The equivalent popular culture term is body language, a term Ray Birdwhistell, considered the founder of this area of study, neither used nor liked (on the grounds that what can be conveyed with the body does not meet the linguist’s definition of language). …
Birdwhistell wished to study how people communicate through posture, gesture, stance and movement. His ideas over several decades were synthesized and resulted in the book Kinesics and Context. Interest in kinesics specifically and nonverbal behaviour generally was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by such popular mass-market (nonacademic) publications as How to Read a Person Like a Book. Part of Birdwhistell’s work involved filming people in social situations and analyzing them to show elements of communication that were not seen otherwise. …
Drawing heavily on descriptive linguistics, Birdwhistell argued that all movements of the body have meaning and that nonverbal behaviour has a grammar that can be analyzed in similar terms to spoken language. Thus, a “kineme” is “similar to a phoneme because it consists of a group of movements which are not identical, but which may be used interchangeably without affecting social meaning.”
A literary signature [is] the visible shorthand for a literary person; a style [is] a more complex but still legible trace of that person’s interaction with the world. Writers usually have more signature than style, I think. Signature is their habit and their practice, their mark; style is something more secretive, more thoroughly dispersed among the words, a reflection of luck or grace, or of a moment when signature overcomes or forgets itself. …
It’s not that style is always or simply better than signature. The signature may be wonderful and the style quite modest. But the style will always be stealthier, …Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
[more to come on Monday, August 1, 2022]
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