My Body in Nine Parts by Raymond Federman Read Free Book Online Page A

should say more about my voice. After all without my voice I’d be nothing. I would have no story.
    I have often been told, by those who read me, that what they hear when they read my books, is my voice, even if they read me silently. Go explain that. And the people who have read me and then meet me in person, are amazed to discover that the fictitious voice they heard in my writing was exactly the same as my real voice. Your books, they say to me, sound exactly like you.
    So, when someone tells me that, I ask: When you read me in English, did you hear my French accent? And if you read me in French, did you detect an English accent?
    Recently, this was in Cannes, of all places, I gave a reading in the splendid garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby’s mansion. Don’t ask me how I got invited to such a swanky and elite place, I don’t even remember myself, but was it swanky and elitist. About hundred literati gathered in the garden for my reading. The entire literary aristocracy of Cannes. It was quite an affair.
    I was reading from the new revised expanded post-modernized edition of Amer Eldorado [originally published in 1974, by les éditions Stock, but now retitled Amer Eldorado 200/1, to indicate that this edition had been totally rewritten, totally reinvented].
    AE2, as friends call this book, was published in 2001 by Les Éditions Al Dante, so it must have been during the summer of 2001, that I read in the garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby in Cannes. Now I remember. It was in July.
    Anyway. After the reading, while we were all sipping le champagne and munching les petits fours de La Comtesse Remy Kirby, a poet, that’s how he introduced himself, I am a poet, my name is Jean-Louis Laplume , he even said it in English to prove to me that he knew English, told me that he loved my reading, he just adored it, especially the risqué passages, but noticed that I speak French with a slight English accent. What an asshole. What a miserable minor poet. I could bury him with my genuine proletarian Parisian accent. Quel petit con! Qu’il aille se faire cuire un oeuf au lieu de faire de la poez. I should have told him .
    I may have a thick French accent when I speak English, an incurable accent, but I definitely not have an English accent when I speak French. And even if I do, I cannot hear it. On the contrary, when I listen to my voice speak French in the interior monologue that mumbles in me incessantly, I hear pure French, classical French uncorrupted by my Anglo-Saxon voice.
    Well, I wanted to clarify this about my voice.

 
MY SEXUAL ORGAN

    I could, of course, tell you much about this part of my body. But that might shock those who claim it is in bad taste to talk openly about one’s sexual organ.
    Therefore, I think it is preferable in this case not to speak of it directly, but to let you, indirectly imagine the adventures and misadventures of this rather private part of my body, commonly called by the French, Le Sexe .
    Concerning my sex, it would be indecent to relate what it did and endured since I first discovered it, at a young age, as an integral part of my body.
    I can, however, tell you this: I have always treated it kindly, gently, even when it was in a bad mood, or when it withdrew into itself, and became depressed.
    I can also tell you, hoping not to embarrass you, that it gave me much pleasure in my life. And let’s hope it will continue to do so.
    Micturating has never been a problem for my sexual organ. He takes that function very calmly. Always there ready to piss. He enjoys it fully. Except when I have an attack of kidney stones. Then he suffers for me.
    My sexual organ found pleasure in many strange places and unusual situations. Situations that sometimes required a certain acrobatic dexterity.
    No, don’t ask me for details. Don’t ask me for a list. I have already said too much. But let me just add that some of these acrobatic situations where not always in beds, or