Quakers and Shakers

I think I would be agitated if I knew my billets-doux were going to be published less than 25 years after my death, but this broad looks so tough, she might be OK with it

I’m beginning to explore a voyeurism fetish.  It started last month with Reborn, the first installment of Susan Sontag’s private diaries, and since then I’ve spent countless hours tracking down the journals, letters and autobiographies of favorite novelists, essayists and artists.  There is something undeniably delightful about drowning oneself in the minutia of another’s daily life, and reading through the journals of authors like Sontag and Plath has been quite reassuring: as far as sex and dating are concerned both women were spending their 19th and 20th years thinking about a lot of the same issues I’m currently ruminating on. 

One particularly interesting find was this December 8 1909 letter from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle Joyce (Ellmann 1975: 185).  Within the context of some of his later letters, it becomes clear that he was writing the letter to help himself and Nora get off during their physical separation. Given this purpose, Joyce does an excellent job of employing diction and syntax to make this writing highly functional smut. Though the descriptive language is at times exquisite, its belletrism never  obscures the point.  Also, I imagine the plethora of short, staccato sentences and lists make this fabulously easy to beat off to.  Compare with some of the shitty-beyond-belief erotic writing over at Literotica to get a better sense of how well-composed this stuff is.

As usual, the kinky stuff is after the jump.

My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump…You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

In 400 pages of Joyce’s correspondence, the only other tidbit that was even remotely as delightful to read was Penn alum Ezra Pound complaining about how entirely incomprehensible he found Finnegans Wake.

Also, as far as the freak out over  sexually explicit text messages, I’d suggest we tell the kiddies they can write whatever they want as long as the quality is top-notch. It’d be great for US literacy rates.

Amber Weekes Relationships, Sexxx