Woods to Outdo Casanova and Cornelius?

Everybody knows about Casanova, or at least they know that there was a guy who had a lot of dames (as they might have put it in the 40's). According to Ted Emery of Dickinson College, and noted by the BBC on the 200^th anniversary of the adventurer's death, Giacomo "Casanova's essential veracity has been well established. He talks of a hundred love affairs...." Few now remember that the famous (or notorious) Venetian was also a violinist, soldier, alchemist, gambler, and "secret agent man," or that he was a translator of Homer (the Iliad - into his native Italian). He was arguably a Renaissance man, if not exactly the kind of Renaissance man a girl would want to bring home to dear old Dad. Until recently, by contrast, Tiger Woods was that kind of parent-friendly guy (albeit he's been married now for a bit) - no matter that he seemed a trifle single-minded. We've all seen those films of him belting a golf ball 150 yards at the age of four...or whenever. They're cute (but possibly at the root of his current woes).

Roald Dahl - yes, that Roald Dahl, the same fellow who wrote the best kids' book ever, Matilda - imagined a character named Oswald Cornelius, against whose memoirs Casanova's allegedly "read like a Parish Magazine..., and the famous lover himself...appears positively undersexed." Both like and unlike Casanova, Dahl's Oswald is also an accomplished man, but in the end, a comically lascivious creature undone by thinking with his Johnson. His breathlessly adoring nephew, who tells the Oswald stories, says, "He was always on the move, from city to city, from country to country, from woman to woman, and in between the women, he would be searching for spiders in Kashmir or tracking down a blue porcelain vase in Nanking."

Aside from the spiders and the vase, does this sound like anybody in the news currently? How wonderful it would have been if Dahl stricken everything after the second "woman" in that sentence, and written, instead, "with a golf bag slung over his shoulder." See, Dahl was actually rather good at seeing into the future, just as surely as Matilda could will small objects (say, like golf balls) to do her bidding.

But our purpose here is not to find Mr. Woods wanting as a well-rounded individual, or to suggest that he has done anything at all except ignite a roaring fire on the internet, and a very strange fire at that. Well within a fortnight of his vehicular mishap in Florida, there are no fewer than seven alleged mistresses notched on his powerful driver, and the Salahis have to be very annoyed. Beyond that, however, is the insatiable thirst for photos of his alleged lovers.

As my always vigilant friend Saul Relative writes, "At present, the demand for pictures of Rachel Uchitel, Jaimee Grubbs, and Kalika Moquin having run their course, the kinky sex stories of Mindy Lawton are driving the hunt for her image. People are curious to see what the woman looks like that Tiger Woods took back to his own house....
"There is also steep demand for Jamie Jungers pictures. Google trends is tracking the number of the Las Vegas cocktail waitress' searches at a large volume, just not as high as the demand for the other three mistresses."

It is a strange and attenuated world that many of us seem to inhabit now, driven this week by panting, digital glimpses of women shot from weird angles - with the notable exception of the porn star who's hit The Allegeds list.

What, you say you're a golfer, too? Fine, then your intention would seem to be ogling women who aren't actually interested in golfers who don't have a bazillion dollars and can't be recorded.

You are strange.

Or maybe I'm just missing the romance in those names: Rachel, Jaimee, Kalika, Jamie, Mindy, Cori, Holly, and the ethereal Unidentified Orlando Woman.

In any event, I'm pretty sure that Casanova would never have been so ungallant as to note the layered irony in one of the last names involved here: Grubbs.

But that was then; this is now.

Sources:

"Casanova: Latin lover of life." BBC.co.uk. 4 June 1998.

Dahl, Roald, "The Visitor." Collected Stories. New York: Everyman's Library, 2006. 645-690.

Relative, Saul. "Tiger Woods Mistress Count: Cori Rish, Mindy Lawton, Jamie Junger Pictures in Demand." associatedcontent.com. 7 December 2009.