Read Pike's Folly for Free Online Page A

misogynous about it, just because it shows one woman sexually dominating another in front of a man. I mean, that’s like saying sexuality is misogynous. What’s misogynous about Marguerite Duras, or Anaïs Nin?”
    â€œI’m not saying it’s
bad,
I’m just saying it’s misogynous,” Heath replied. The film they’d been watching was
Ilsa: The
Wicked Warden,
which showed a female warden sticking pins into a woman’s breasts, another being suffocated to death in front of her sister, still another lying on a torture table while a prison guard injected acid into her vagina—all fairly typical of the 1970s women-in-prison genre but not, perhaps, the best choice for Thanksgiving Day entertainment. “I’m not making a value judgment about it,” he continued. “I think misogyny is a perfectly valid form of artistic expression. Look at Philip Roth.”
    Allison, who’d never read anything by Roth, said, “There’s a big difference between something like that and
Ilsa: The Wicked
Warden.
”
    â€œNot necessarily. A Roth novel can be as fucked up as any sexploitation film. What you’re reacting to is the difference between two art forms. Film is more visceral than print. There are things people will tolerate in a book that they’d never stand for in a movie.”
    â€œWhatever.” She turned off the TV with the remote. “I think the whole idea of misogyny is misogynous, anyway. It’s patronizing.”
    â€œBeing misogynous?”
    â€œNo, always saying, ‘Oh, that’s misogynous,’ just because you think I don’t know how to stand up for myself.”
    He reached across the bed and took the remote out of her hands. “You know that’s not what I think. I just don’t want you to be offended by the film.”
    â€œI’m
not.
” She rolled out of bed, threw on one of Heath’s shirts and went into the tiny bathroom off the kitchen. Her muscles had tensed up during the movie, and she now found herself unable to pee. Flushing the toilet anyway, she washed her hands under a trickle of water and returned to the kitchen to make coffee. Heath had put on a Beach Boys CD, one of his several bootlegs from the legendary
Smile
sessions of late ’66, early ’67. Heath was a
Smile
fanatic, and his collection of memorabilia from that particular era in the band’s history was extensive. Each bootleg was slightly different, and the same songs often had different titles—“Friday Night” was also “I’m in Great Shape,” or “The Woodshop Song,” even “I’ll Be Around,” depending on which reference work you consulted. As for the songs themselves, most were just brief, elliptical patterns— “feels,” as Brian Wilson called them—more like backing tracks than finished compositions, as if all the rhythmic and harmonic sequences had been laid down without the melody. Part of
Smile
’s appeal was that, as a record, it only partially existed; various parts of it were lost, destroyed, never recorded, still sitting in a vault somewhere. Unlike the other relics of the sixties—
Sgt.
Pepper,
even the Beach Boys’ own
Pet Sounds
—
Smile
’s power came from its very inscrutability, the fact that it didn’t exist in any definitive form. Much of what remained of the sessions sounded trite and sophomoric, hardly the stuff of myth.
Smile
was certainly not up to the refined level of Brian Wilson’s other, better-known efforts like “California Girls” and “I Get Around.” But at the same time, it
was
a masterpiece, because what he’d managed to capture on tape, however fleetingly, was the sound of his own mind coming apart. Even the titles suggested a young and once-brilliant Wilson struggling with his exhausted imagination: “I Love to Say Dada,” “Do You Like Worms,” “Tune X,”