Divas of San Francisco: Portraits of Transsexual Women by David Steinberg (Red Alder Books, 2008)

David writes:

People who want to buy the book can get it at Amazon, or can send a check for $25 (half price plus postage) made out to me at:

David Steinberg
Red Alder Books
PO Box 641312
San Francisco, CA 94164

All images copyright 2007 by David Steinberg

Continue Reading »

I’m not sure how long they’ve been online, but James Joyce’s lust letters have recently been getting some notice in the blogosphere.

I wrote about them in my book The Disinformation Book of Lists: Subversive Facts and Hidden Information in Rapid-fire Format, specifically in the list “12 Erotic Works by Well-Known Writers”:

————————————————————————–

Although his works stirred up trouble because of some racy passages, it’s his letters to his common-law wife Nora Barnacle that are downright filthy. So filthy, in fact, that Joyce’s literary estate has sworn that they will never again be published. But they were published around 40 ago in The Selected Letters of James Joyce. If you can get your hands on a copy, you’ll read things like “my dirty little fuckbird!” “pull out my mickey and suck it like a teat,” “I would love to be whipped by you,” “the heavy smell of your behind,” and “a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers.” Yep, Joyce reveled in the sound and smell of Nora’s farts and turds. “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere,” he wrote on December 8, 1909. “I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

On December 2, 1909, he explained to Nora the twin feelings of love that he has for her—the spiritual side and the earthy, physical side:

It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tales with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in my behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.

These gloriously filthy, unashamed missives are truly some of the best erotic writing I’ve ever read. Joyce’s literary genius, his raging horniness, and his devotion to Nora are a combination that can never be beat. It’s a crying shame that his heirs now deprive the world of such high-caliber smut.

————————————————————————–

The scholarly book Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture includes the fascinating article “Translation and the ‘Surreptitious Classic’: Obscenity and Translatability” by Deborah H. Roberts, Chair of Classics at Haverford College:

Euphemism by generalization seems to be particularly common in translations of Martial, where the frequency of obscenity poses a particular challenge to those who aim at complete editions. So, for Martial’s ‘cunnum Charinus lingit et tamen pallet’ (1.77.6, Charinus licks cunt and is still pale) Bohn’s version has ‘Charinus indulges in infamous debauchery - and yet he is pale’ and the Pott/Wright versified translation has ‘And e’en his vices do not make him blush.’ Similarly, where Martial has ‘Pedicatur Eroc, fellat Linus’ (7.10.1, Eros gets buggered, Linus sucks), we find ‘Eros has one filthy vice, Linus has another’, and ‘Eros and Linus are debauched, you say.’ …

We find similar vagueness in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in the passage in which Lysistrata draws the other women’s attention to the absence of any source of sexual satisfaction (107-110):

[Greek text omitted]

“Not even s spark of a lover is left.
And ever since the Milesians betrayed us,
I haven’t seen a dildo eight fingers long

Which might have been a leather source of help.”

A number of stranslators omit the dildo altogether, but Rogers’s translation offers a kind of place-holder for the unnamed object:

“No husbands now, no sparks, no anything.
For ever since Miletus played us false,
We’ve had no joy, no solace, none at all.”

Lest you think that wimpy translations of Martial are relics of the prudish past, Joseph S. Salemi’s accurate, unblushing translations stirred things up in 1990:

Responses were predictable: after reading some of my Martial translations in public, I was excoriated by the usual contingent of born-again Christians and militant feminists. Some academic careerists quietly urged me to drop the project of translating so repellent an author, lest I offend those inscrutable forces that dole out promotion and tenure. Editors showed even less spine; only six American journals out of fifty-four would publish selections from Martial–and this from a literary establishment that proclaims itself a defender of artistic freedom against Senator Helms. Typical was the comment of one trendy New York editor: “I enjoyed your translations immensely, but I could never print them.”

The complete Lost Girls will be published as a swanky single-volume hardcover retailing for $45 (Amazon has it for $29.70), compared to the original three-volume set from 2006 that retailed for $75 (and is now out of print). It’s due in April.

It’s a tough call, but my vote for the greatest erotic line(s) of poetry is the close of Neruda’s “Every Day You Play,” the fourteenth poem in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair:

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

The whole last stanza is amazing, with each line even greater than the one that came before it, stair-stepping to a perfect, beautiful penultimate line that leads to that greatest line of all.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

[Translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin.]

—————

OK, this is weird. I Googled the final line of the poem to see what might pop up. On his blog Crafty Odysseus, Tim Leach has posted the entire poem, mentioning in his intro that it’s “notable for including possibly the sexiest final line of a poem ever written….” Taking this synchronicty to unbearable limits, he posted this just two days ago. Clutching my skull, I shriek, “Tim, get out of my heeeeeeaaaaaad!”

The winter issue of one of my all-time favorite magazines, Lapham’s Quarterly (”Finding the present in the past, the past in the present.”), came out last month, and the theme this time is “Eros.” As usual, there are close to 100 text pieces from literary types, historical figures, and the occasional unknown - the contrib list this time includes Ovid, Flaubert, Goethe, Rumi, Nabokov, Nin, Dickinson, Henry VIII, a courtesan in India circa 1550, Aristophanes, Roth, Duras, David Foster Wallace, Foucault, Leonard Cohen, St. Augustine, Sappho, Aphra Behn, Kinsey, and Charles Mingus.

For an eclectomanic like me, each heavily illustrated 224-page issue (each one is really a square-backed softcover book) is an embarrassment of riches - a smorgasbord of ideas, insights, and experiences from across the millennia in one package for convenient mainlining into my brain.

Lapham’s posts only a fraction of each issue, apparently holding the strange belief that if you want to read a magazine, you should actually buy the magazine (I wonder if this approach will catch on).

One of the pieces they’ve posted for their sex issue is an extract from Hemingway’s memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast. Papa is reassuring F. Scott Fitzgerald about his penis size after Zelda has attempted to psychologically destroy him. Here’s a portion:

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

“Come out to the office,” I said.

“Where is the office?”

“Le water,” I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

“You’re perfectly fine,” I said. “You are okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”

Edward Gorey - the illustrator and writer whose macabre, darkly humorous Edwardian-Gothic style is immediately recognizable, even if his name isn’t - wrote over a hundred small books, the best-known probably being The Gashlycrumb Tinies (an ABC book in which 26 children meet gruesome ends. A digital bootleg us here).

A lot of the late Gorey’s work has been reprinted over the years, but his etiquette-book parody The Recently Deflowered Girl (1965) isn’t one of them (and it doesn’t seem likely to be). Copies go for around $100 on the antiquarian market. Luckily for us, someone at LiveJournal scanned the entire thing, but it was pulled, whether for drawing too much traffic or for copyright violation, we don’t know.

Now it’s mirrored at the “Accordian Guy’s” blog here.