Poet Sylvia Plath's Son, Nicholas Hughes, Commits Suicide

From Hillel Italie & Rachel D'Oro of the AP (links added by SPS):

When Nicholas Hughes was in his early 20s, his father, poet Ted Hughes, advised him on the importance of living bravely.

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated," Hughes wrote to his son, who committed suicide at 47 last week at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, 46 years after Nicholas' mother, poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself.

"And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

From the time that Plath died, in 1963, Ted Hughes had tried to protect and strengthen their children, Frieda and Nicholas, from their mother's fate and fame. He burned the last volume of his wife's journals, a decision strongly criticized by scholars and fans, and waited years to tell his children the full details of Plath's suicide.

And only near the end of his own life, in his "Birthday Letters" poems, did he share his side of modern poetry's most famous and ill-starred couple.

"What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn't want to read it," he wrote to Nicholas in 1998, months before Ted Hughes died of cancer.

"And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It's as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I never could think. I have a freedom of imagination I've not felt since 1962. Just to have got rid of all that."

"But I tell you all this," Hughes added, "with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things. ... Don't laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to."

Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. He was a man of science, not letters, the only member of his immediate family not to become a poet. A fisheries biologist, he spent nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences. He left in December 2006, according to the university's Web site.

Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through the Times of London, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."

"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father," Frieda Hughes wrote. "He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan."

Nicholas Hughes graduated from the University of Oxford in 1984, and received a master's of arts degree from Oxford, in 1990, before emigrating to the United States and getting a doctorate from the University of Alaska.

Hughes' family history was an "urban legend" that was passed around from student to student. But it was a subject no one discussed with him, said Kevin Schaberg, a former student in a fish ecology class taught by Hughes.

"It was obviously something he did not want to talk about," said Schaberg, who added that he knew Hughes struggled with depression. "I never brought it (his family) up. He never brought it up."

Mark Wipfli, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Alaska and a good friend of Hughes, said that Hughes never spoke of his mother to him, but he talked warmly of his father, who sometimes visited Hughes in Alaska. Even though he had left the university, Hughes remained active in research and was a key scientist in an ongoing study of king salmon.

"I would really like to see him recognized in his own right, not just as the son of two famous people," Wipfli said. "In his own right, he was an incredibly wonderful person."

Hughes not only taught about fish, he also enjoyed fishing and other Alaska pursuits, such as skiing, boating and hunting moose and caribou. What stands out the most for Schaberg, however, is Hughes' vast knowledge of fish, his instant recall of authors, titles and journals on even the most obscure subjects.

"Nick was probably one of the smartest guys I've ever met," he said. "When it came to fish, he was a walking bibliography."

Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents separated and was still an infant when his mother died in February 1963, gassing herself in a London flat as her children slept. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."

Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the prophetic "Ariel" poems --"I shall never grow old," she wrote-- she had been working on near the end of her life.

The immediate cause of her breakup with Hughes was his affair with Assia Wevill. Plath's legacy haunted her husband, hounded for years by women who believed he was responsible for her suicide and by a procession of biographers and fans obsessed with the brief, impassioned and tragic marriage between the two poets.

Ted Hughes relived the tragedy not only through the constant reminders of Plath, but also through the suicide of Wevill, his second wife, who in March 1969 killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter.

Also: Guardian's coverage and Mirror's coverage

High-Five Friday: Getting By With A Little Help From My Friends Edition

This week's High-Fives on this Friday, possible because you all send in good stuff.

1 From Gracie at Sex-Kitten: The real Little Dorrit: the inspiration for Dickens' classic novel was a single mother- turned-prostitute.

2 A report in a 1979 National Enquirer leads to an explanation of why "Women Born From 1905 to 1909 Had The Fewest Children."

3 CR/LF sent me a link to Dances of Port Said.

4 Sweat Shop Sissy sent this link to Slip of a Girl, who then sent it to me: Sex tips, from the year 1894.

5 John Coulthart (via BoingBoing) sent me a link to this signed bronze piece which has already been sold. However, there's another, and note how the satyr's head can be removed to see the rigid cock.

Not Even The Ankh Can Save It

It might delight you to know that I'm a freak for ancient Egyptian history -- and I say 'freak' because any anthropologist, archaeologist, or historian will tell you that Egyptology draws the freakiest of all persons, making Egyptologists the butt of all jokes.

My affection for such study began in childhood, followed me through college course selection, and remains with me today. Back in 1973 I was an ankh obsessed girl -- earrings, bracelets, chokers, you name it, I was covered in it -- so it would have thrilled me then to have discovered The Coven, "A sensational novel of Washington intrigue and witchcraft by Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt writing as David St. John" (Fawcett Crest, printed October, 1973).

The back of the book, sans mention of ankh, would still have held promise to a young me who fancied romantic notions of secret sects:

WHO WAS
ANDREE LESCAULT?

No one really knew much about the murdered songstress except that she had been extraordinarily beautiful, that her singing cast a strange spell over all who listened, and that even sophisticated Washington had fallen victim to that spell. There was talk that some of her tribal chants were really secret rites. There was also talk that a certain powerful and handsome senator with presidential ambitions had a special interest in her. A very special interest.

Jonathan Gault found that out when they summoned him to find her murderer. He had also heard Andree sing and felt the presence of something macabre and evil...

The victim, Lescaunt, was more than an Afro-French chanteuse; the mystical ankh that she and most of her musical followers wore leads the investigation into a cult, of course.

From page 45:

Out of delicacy or ignorance the jeweler hadn't told Ellen a few other details about the Ankh that I was able to learn at the Georgetown Library. The basic form was an oval atop a tau cross. A magical symbol, at its most elemental level it represented a human being. Antedating Christianity, it was believed a precursor of the crucifix. And its sexual significance was explicit. According to Dioscurian legend the Ankh established both the rising and falling currents of life. The symbol abounded on the tomb of Tutankhamon, even as filigree design in the pharaoh's funerary furniture. And wherever it was displayed it signified inexhaustible, all-prevailing potency.

The Ankh. The ansate or handled cross.

An amulet, periapt, magic charm; a talisman for those it touched. Andree Lescaut had worn it, and her enthusiasts as well. Was it a recognition sign among members of some latter-day Egyptian secret society, devotees of a cult? Dedicated to what? African Music?

Aside from the fact that the author stretched his word-count with the behavior of a thesaurus, what else do we learn...

• That black is beautiful, baby -- so long as it comes hither via France.
• That religious things predating Christianity are not only secretive & sexual, but murderous -- especially if linked to another culture's music.

While my thirteen year old girl's loins flush with heat at such simple sentences as "And its sexual significance was explicit", even then I was disappointed that such a ripe sentence not only bore no fruit but, lacking any attempt at back-up, had apparently sprung from nothing more than the author's mind; just another diversionary perversion.

The rest of the novel with Gault as its aggressive and sexually swaggering male lead reads like classic pulp detective fiction, albeit there are a few timely updates such as the reference to Gault's equally aggressive and sexually swaggering female gal pal, Gina. Case in point, this example from page 47:

[Gina] leaned back against the sofa and stretched, catlike. "I can think of things even more interesting--but there I go, seducing you again."

"Women's Lib influence. Equal rights for females."

Yeah, having the ERA referenced by some white male Nixon punk as a means to some sexually aggressive tail is exactly what I enjoy. Not.

In fact, there's really nothing to please me in this book -- not even the romantic ankh loving girl of my youth would have been satisfied with the shoddy writing, stock characters, fade-to-black sex scenes, the poor diversionary perversion of the Ankh, the thinly veiled stabs at Kennedy & youth culture, or anything else in this book. It could have been a sinfully good bit of escapism, as many pulps are, but it missed the mark.

(Curt Purcell at The Groovy Age Of Horror has another review of the book, in case you should want to hear more.)

When discussing Hunt's books, (too) many folks focus on his Washington & CIA experiences, saying, as Tim Weiner at the NY Times did upon Hunt's death, that, "His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight." Poo. That's people wishing to legitimize poor books based on the employ of the author -- when they can't boost the written work any other way.

So why give it so much space here at SPS?

Well, what is rather interesting about The Coven is its author, E. Howard Hunt.

Yeah, yeah, everybody knows that the guy was a criminal. But wanna know what else is creepy? His son's own description of him.

When Hunt died in January of 2007, his son, David Hunt, celebrated the "good to know not everyone thought of my father as evil" sentiments by posting comments to this post about his father's books. When one comment-leaver said, "I have a copy of Stranger in Town, 1st ed., 1947, signed “Howard Hunt”, and inscribed “For Mary with love Howie” - Any idea who Mary is?", David replied:

I would imagine Mary was probably a romantic interest. Only his closest friends called him Howie. My father was quite a playboy back in the day. Being a writer, musician and secret agent he had his pick. He was a smooth operator for sure. We did have a nanny named Mary Trainer for many years in Japan and Spain but I doubt he would use “Howie” when signing something for someone in his employ

Here poor naive David waxes nostalgic on his pa's hero status as a sexual predator, yet manages to turn a blind eye to the possibility of the smooth operator's ability to bonk the nanny.

I don't know the nanny in question or even anything about her, but it seems to me that a playboyesque spy with a penchant for extramarital activities would certainly have the potential to at least be on friendly enough terms with the female help to sign a copy of his book with his nickname.

Reading and rereading David's comment, it sure sounds like married daddy was having affairs... Well, that was his due as a man with "his pick" of women, right?

Or maybe the son just likes to imagine his father as something better than he was, more like the leads in the novels... Triumphing in sexual conquest is the male ideal -- as long as it's not with the nanny.

Do I believe E. Howard Hunt was a playboy & a smooth operator?

I'd say he'd have to be better at that than he was as an author.

Reading Is Sexy

Writing is sexier.



Vintage Saturday Evening Post cartoon by Leo Garel, clearly water-damaged, but who can toss the clipping aside?

Filed under "sexism" because it sure smells like a gold digger dig to me.

Kafka's Porn Stash

John Coulthart alerted me to this: Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet.

James Hawes, academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of Kafka's porn stash in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. Hawes says his book "seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a 'quasi-saintly' image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals."

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

Since I'm all for looking at humans in their full complexity, I can't wait to see/read the book myself -- and will hold off on more comments until then.

(Then again, I've never read Kafka... Must I read him before the bio-outing? I guess that depends upon one's views; reading this to know of the man vs. the myth, risking future reading of his works, or having proper literary framework first.)

The article is excellent -- only out-done in read-worthiness by the comments; here are a few:

Porn is nauseating, no matter who reads it. And in Kafkas time, it was not widely accessible,. It was a more normal, safer world back then, naive as that may sound. Kafka was a disturbed person, and that was the key to his originality. It is a greater achievement to be original, yet a whole person.

Fosse, Oslo, Norway

We have become worse than the Victorians ever were! (And I say that as a scholar of Victorian lit.) The combination of prurient invasion of privacy and hypocritical condemnation is more revolting than any pornography could ever be. Everyone has private fantasies, some are weird. So what?

Carol Siegel, Portland, USA

I love Kafka, and I would definitely pay to read his porn, especially if it's dark and unpleasant. I really hope that this material will be widely released in my lifetime.

Jenna, Tampa,

I don't see what the massive deal here is. As far as some of the material being quite dark, Kafka seemed to be a guy with some pretty dark places anyway. His sexuality wouldn't likely be much different. "Nothing but a pervert" is, I think, inaccurate and unfair.

Laura, Some,

As Coulthart said when he sent me the link, "Can't wait to see the reaction when the book appears."

Related: Franz Kafka tribute of "recomposed photographs".

Earl Kemp On Fandom

Chatter with Earl Kemp continues...

(If you missed earlier parts of the interview: Intro, on science fiction, on censorship and politics, on reading and writing.)

SPS: I can understand your reluctance to return to editing... But a memoir? Or an anthology of your own works? You've been writing for years and have many fans...

Earl: That's the good part about the LA show mentioned separately. Makes me feel huge and significant with people actually wanting to meet me, to look at me askance and, unconsciously touch me. Sure makes me wonder where I was when I was doing all those wonderful things they imagine me doing.



SPS: OK, to recap you think the Internet is wonderful, but you still don't see the possibility of a return to or recreation of the sf community -- or any author/fan family?

Earl: No I don't. It's all part of the burgeoning of the world. Everything is becoming too big, too costly, too unmanageable even by those in power who think they're doing it right and only for the buck. They don't get any of it. They don't want to get any of it. They don't want anything disproving their concepts of what they think of as money-making reality.

The best times are always with the right person/people/group and that is limited, by necessity, to all one can handle.

There are annual World SF Cons...they attract many thousands of people from far too many tangential directions with their own crosses to bare. Multiple tracks of bland propaganda hyping things of no significance. Twenty to 30 program items going on simultaneously in several different ballrooms and, at times, even in several different 4-star, plush, unreasonably expensive hotels, some within walking distance.

SPS: I'll admit I've never been... It's always seemed more for exhibitionists than shared/sharing interests. But hey, I'm now elusive, if not heading for hermit status.

Your points about size are valid; it is difficult to create mass intimacy. Orgies do not satiate when the real point is a connection based on something more than body contact. Yet immense popularity sort of forces the situation, no?

Earl: It certainly forces me to avoid the situation. Otherwise I would find myself spending thousands that I don't have just to sneak around and secretly meet old friends who are doing the same thing and avoiding all else.

SPS: It's a conundrum of sorts... Fans create popularity; yet the more popular the person/work/genre, the less access and connection. In some cases this decreases popularity; in other cases, I think it decreases the quality/care of the work/person. (Then again there's the misplaced idolization of celebrity itself.) Have you any thoughts on how to balance this?

Earl: No. [But] then there is the annual Corflu meeting of fanzine editors, usually less than 200 where everyone knows your face and damned near everything else. A sit down, hash it out, get screwed up, network with your closest friends from all over the world. Heaven! I can hardly wait.



Image credits:

LAPB 2008 photos at NooSFere.

Corflu photo from gsmattingly at Flickr.

Earl Kemp: Acres of Nubile Flesh

In Acres of Nubile Flesh, Earl Kemp exposes the business of finding nude models and actors for Greenleaf projects:

Where do they all come from?

Bodies all over the place, everywhere you looked, stumbling over each other trying to be next in line. Where do they all come from?

There was a while, back during the late 1960s and on into the '70s, when I was buying people by the ton. It sure seemed that way, at least. After Greenleaf Classics began buying magazines filled with photos of naked people packaged by outside contractors, I began growing annoyed with the types of people they were using as models. Somehow, they were doing things all wrong, I contended. They should be paying attention to what those people look like at least, and cleaning up some of them considerably ahead of time.

Naturally, I figured I could pick desirable people out as well as the next guy, and hopefully a little bit better while I was at it. I had no sooner begun contacting Los Angeles area modeling agencies when they started barraging me with telephone calls themselves. I had no idea there were so many modeling agencies in the entire state, much less in Hollywood alone. Each one of those agencies had loose leaf notebooks filled with Polaroid photos of naked people for me to look at…lots and lots of loose leaf notebooks. It was much easier that way, flipping the pages, looking at the naked people trying to smile up at me from within those loose leaves.

Earl Kemp also, literally, exposes himself...



And others too...

Occasionally, and just for fun, I would insert photographs of personal friends without their knowledge, in the nude, into some of our various publications. Then, after the publication appeared, give them copies of it and point them out inside the issue. Without exception, every one of them was pleased with the surprise and passed copies of them around among their friends.

In a similar jest, I would also insert close-up photos of myself without showing my face into those books or magazines. At one time, most of the black cork wall on one side of my office was pinned with tear sheets of just me, and not one person working there knew it was me. I recall taking my cue for this from Alfred Hitchcock, who always inserted himself into each of his productions. I figured I could easily outcock Hitchcock, and I did.

Continue reading this issue of Kemp's fanzine for more on Song of the Loon, the work "that started a mini revolution in sleaze book publishing," the film Adultery for Fun and Profit, and the film's aftermath too -- featuring lots of great old ephemera and lurking federal government guys.

Jennifer Cody Epstein On Prostitute-Concubine-Post-Impressionist Pan Yuliang

A brief interview with Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of The Painter from Shanghai, a novel based upon the life of Chinese painter Pan Yuliang.

Pan Yuliang is a wonderful artist -- but one who is often discussed more for her struggle to become one (having been sold at the age of 14 into prostitution by her only surviving relative) and for her nude works (at a time when such works were scandalous).

I'm delighted to have Jennifer's insight here...

SPS: When/how did you first become aware of Pan Yuliang?

Jennifer: I was actually the Guggenheim with my husband and some relatives—roughly ten years ago. The exhibition—which was amazing--was on Modern Chinese Art, and there was just one image by Pan Yuliang on display. But it drew me over immediately; it was a typical Pan Yuliang in that it was very evocative of Matisse and Cezanne, and the bright, bold colors and distinctly Western setting (as compared to the huge propaganda-style images and much more subtle ink paintings around it) really stood out for me.

SPS: What was it that captured you & compelled you to write the book?

Jennifer: Upon seeing the picture, I went over to study it more closely. And when I read about Pan’s story (prostitute-concubine-Post-Impressionist icon; really?!) it just blew me away. I’d never heard of her before—but I couldn’t, at that moment, understand why---it struck me that everyone should know about her. I suppose writing the book was one way to try to understand her, and to try to imagine what making that sort of an extraordinary journey would be like.

SPS: How long did it take to create the book?

Jennifer: From inception to publication it was almost exactly ten years--so a long time! Granted, throughout that period I quite my job at NBC, finished an MFA at Columbia and also had my two daughters, so there were some side-trips.

SPS: Why write a novel, rather than a biography?

Jennifer: Mainly because I'd made the decision--after ten years in journalism--to try writing fiction, which I'd always wanted to do. But also because Pan's story ended up being one of those where I actually had to use creative license in order to get any sort of a complete sense of her. Even the art historians I spoke to confirmed that there is so little actually factually known about her (even the birthdate on her gravestone in Paris is generally agreed to be inaccurate) that in order to get a full sense of her life, one has to simply imagine.

SPS: You mention there is little documentation or biographical information about her... What do you think that is due to? A lack of respect for her, her art? Did her popularity increase after her death, when it was "too late" for much information? Or was it a general lack of respect for women in general? Or just a problem in general of artists from that time? Something else?

Jennifer: I think the lack of documentation was in part a combination of all these factors. But I also think that Pan herself kept a pretty tight grip on her story and was very careful about the versions of it she allowed out. This isn't surprising, given how wildly controversial both her work and her history were, and also given the fact that people tended to pay more attention to the latter than the former.

SPS: Have you seen Hua hun, and if so, what are your thoughts on the film?

Jennifer: I have. I actually knew about the film fairly early into my research, but held off watching it until I was well grounded in my own book and characters---I didn't want to risk being overly influenced by it. think I finally sat through it after I'd already finished with Shanghai in my book and was moving on to Paris. I certainly appreciated Hua Hun for its beauty--it was very well-done, and I loved the intense aestheticism of it visually. But I did feel that--like the biography it's based on--the movie portrayed Pan Yuliang as somewhat less of a self-determined woman and artist than I came to see her as. The general sense I got from watching it was that she was more or less shaped by the actions of the men around her; e.g., rescued despite herself from the brothel, guided into art and school by her husband, etc. I sensed such a strength of character and will in her paintings, though, that I really wanted to give her more of a role in her evolution as an artist.

It's been noted to me, incidentally, that some readers think i made her too strong--they don't find her particularly likeable. But my sense is (both from my own musings and from what I've heard) that she wasn't an easy person in real life to either know or to like--so I suppose in some ways that just makes me hope that I got something right!

SPS: Did she have any children?

Jennifer: She did not. The biographical info points to at least one pregnancy but (as I write [in the book]) that was terminated. She did adopt her husband's son, however; he's still alive I believe, in Anhui province.

SPS: If you could say in one sentence (of what took a decade to create) -- what you think is the sum of the book... I guess that would be two sentences --

Jennifer: The sum, for me, is really the boundless creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit (though I hope that doesn't make people gag!). The truth is, Pan Yuliang was pretty much damned from the start by so many factors--her gender, her class, her country of origin; the fact that her parents died and her uncle was an opium addict; the fact that she was sold into a brothel. It's a set of circumstances that most women would simply not have survived. And yet thanks to her resilience, talent and the sheer bravery she displayed in painting what she wanted, regardless of cost, she has left other women and artists this extraordinary example and legacy. (I'm sorry, that's four sentences and a lot of semicolons!)

SPS: That's OK -- it took me how many sentence fragments just to get near a question. *wink* Do you have a "one sentence bit" of what you hope the reader walks away with from The Painter From Shanghai?

Jennifer: That even in the most apparently dire of circumstances you still have the power to shape your own dreams, goals, life.

SPS: And, in one sentence, what did you walk away from the experience with?

Jennifer: The thrill of having had Pan Yuliang and China as a job for the past decade (how lucky is that!?), and a renewed faith in myself for actually having published a historical novel with family and sanity (at least somewhat) intact!

Thanks, Jennifer; I can't wait to read it!

You can read more on Jennifer's process with the book here; and catch a live interview with the author on XXBN's Cult of Gracie, tonight (Wednesday, July 16th) at 9 P.M. (central).

Call in questions and comments are welcome at 1 (646) 200-3136. (And rumor has it that a copy of The Painter from Shanghai will be given away to live callers...)

If you miss the show, you can listen to the archived show (or download it) here.


See also:

The Nude in the Art of Pan Yuliang, by Elsa Favreau.

A Lonely Legacy of Pan Yuliang: Capital Museum in Beijing Exhibit

See more of Pan Yulian's works here.

Earl Kemp On Reading & Writing

Continuing my talk with Earl Kemp. (Intro, on science fiction, on censorship and politics).

SPS: I was reading about Greenleaf and the apparently surprising popularity of gay works at that time... It is said now that many women are fans of such books and films -- straight women are the primary fans of written works and lesbians a large part of film sales. At the time you were producing gay publications for Greenleaf did you notice this?

Earl: I did notice how very popular the genre was, and that it was almost totally forbidden at the time. I also noticed that female writers (even straight ones) of lesbian material were off the wall possessive of their opinions that were often in conflict with our editors and our sales. Also numbers of straight male writers wrote gay novels. Also purchasers of gay material were more willing to pay for quality up to and including the type of paper the books were printed on.

These days, I find very little difference between our '60s books and modern bestsellers. Except perhaps that females use more dirty words and figure more prominently in them...as writers and readers and especially as protagonists on the prowl. Harlequin grown up and no holds barred for female readers.

SPS: Your comments about female reading materials is a bit foreign to me personally... I do know that it's said that women are the majority of book buyers, but as for that formula, it's not really me.

Earl: Locally they appear to be in the majority. Most local men would deny that they ever read any book.

SPS: What's on Earl Kemp's "must read" list?

Earl: I don't have one. I enjoy William Diehl very much. I can tolerate an occasional James Patterson but sure wish he had some Creative Writing classes and an editor and a proofreader. Some of my old friend writers still thrill me these days, notably Lawrence Block and Donald Westgate. Even Hunter did it too until he died, but in all of their books I find myself and our common past and all the things we learned how to do together.

I momentarily forgot (it's difficult to remember quickly and make snappy comments) two of my all time favorites, Elmore Leonard who can write no wrong and Larry McMurtry.



SPS: "Ahh," she said nodding.

I'm not certain I can articulate what resonates about that, nor follow it up with anything. If I were talking my thoughts, I'd open my mouth as if to speak then think better of it; then repeat the process several times. It's rare anyone can move me to such a silence.

Is this, do you think, the same for your dislike of TV, films etc... This lack of being able to find yourself there?

On the other hand, that seems a bit odd for a man who was hooked by other worlds... But then not feeling 'at home here' seems to have been a common theme I hear/read from sf authors.

I realize there is no direct question there. Just a few scattered thoughts. I might have been better off just keeping my mouth shut.

Earl: Oh, no. I always find myself there. At times even before the film begins or the novel opens. I am the original "reader identification" guy.

Of course. I was never "at home there." I was born into a foreign place with a language that I never understood among people doing nothing very slowly. A stranger and afraid in a world I never made. I didn't come alive until around the age of 30 and wasn't born a human until I was divorced. I'm still trying to shake off my teenage years and become an adult.

[As for keeping your mouth shut] You don't learn/exchange anything that way.

SPS: Given that sf was such a 'family' community before, I have to ask about Tiptree...

What did you think of her? Her writing? Did her stand-offishness affect your connection/appreciation? Did her secret affect your opinions of her &/or her writing?

Earl: I have no thoughts about her. She's after my time. I've never read anything by her.

SPS: How can Tiptree be after your time? You're still here. You're still reading. An aversion, perhaps?

Earl: Possibly. I think I explained that when I was a working editor I had not the slightest chance of reading for personal pleasure. Now I do. Now I'm very selective in who wrote it and whatever it is that I think I want to read. Currently around a novel a day with a little nonfiction thrown in for grins.

Images from Earl Kemp's efanzine: Greenleaf's The Man From C.A.M.P. series, Agent 0008 Checklist.

Of White Squaws, Murders & Memoirs

From The Mail and Empire, Toronto, dated March 23, 1935, comes this clipping of the story for a renewed search for Maud Gillespie -- 40+ years after she was "kidnapped by Indians".


Leaving definitions & connotations of the word "squaw" to those far more suited to such endeavors (and I highly recommend you read it; regardless of your initial interest), I'm fascinated by such a story...

So many details are missing... Like the age of Maud when she was "kidnapped" or otherwise disappeared... Why her family members aren't listed by names, rather than crediting John Findlay... And, of course, did they find her?

Then again, is this even true?

If we can believe John Wilson Murray, Ontario's first salaried "Provincial Constable" appointed to act as "Detective for the Government of Ontario", it is true -- and they did find her.

From chapter 47 of Memoirs of a Great Detective: Incidents in the Life of John Wilson Murray:

"A few weeks after my return from St. Paul and Aeneas, there was another disappearance. It occurred hundreds of miles from the old home of Aeneas. About five miles from Thessalon, on the shore of Georgian Bay in the district of Manitoulin, lived a family of farmers named Gillespie. There was a pretty thirteen-year-old daughter, Maud Gillespie. Early in August 1888 she went out to pick berries and did not return. She was seen last near a trout stream, and a bully good trout stream it is, as I happen to know. Searching parties went out and hunted for days, but could find no trace of the child. On August 11th I went up to Thessalon and began another search. I organised parties and apportioned the territory, and sent some on foot and others in boats, and for days and nights we scoured the islands and the shores of Georgian Bay. We visited scores of Indian camps, and pushed on into the wilds, but could not find her. I knew she had no life insurance, and was not a county treasurer, and that her disappearance therefore was not suspicious, so far as she was concerned. Her parents were well-nigh distracted, and I determined to make a final effort to find her. With a small party I went far up to remote Indian camps, and in one of them I found an old squaw, who nodded and grunted to me, and I went outside with her.

"'White girl?' she asked.

"I nodded. The old squaw held out her hand.

"'Give,' she grunted. 'Give.'

"I drew out some money. She sniffed. I felt in my pockets. I had a couple of trout flies in some tinfoil; I took them out. The old squaw seized the glittering tinfoil eagerly, taking my last trout flies with it. She tucked it in her jet black hair, coarse as a horse's tail.

"'Me — see — white girl,' she muttered slowly. 'She go — so — so — so ——,' and she waved far north with her long arm.

"'Alone?' I asked. 'She go alone? Indian take white girl?'

"But the old squaw only grunted and played with the tinfoil and trout flies in her hair. We searched farther north, and twice we heard from Indians of a white girl who had passed that way. When further trailing was hopeless we turned back and made our way to Thessalon. It was a long, hard tramp. On the fourth day I came to the trout stream, where the little girl last was seen. I was tired, and I stretched full length on the ground and idly gazed at the blue sky through the trees, and then rolled over and stared at the water. It was a lovely stream. It glided beneath the over- growth into a broad, deep pool, on whose placid surface the reflection of the waving trees rose and fell amid patches of mirrored blue. Farther down the stream narrowed and rippled over rocks, splashing and gurgling as it went. But there must be no drifting aside into a fish story. I lolled by the stream until my men came up, and we moved on. No further trace of little Maud Gillespie was found, and I returned to Toronto. Fifteen years passed. In May 1903 a surveying party was exploring in New Ontario north of Lake Superior, over four hundred miles from the Gillespie home. They came upon a white woman living with the Indians in the wilderness. She was the wife of a big chief. She possessed a rare beauty of the wilds, yet was not wholly like her associates. She lived as an Indian, and exposure had tanned her a deep, dark brown. At first she was unable to talk with the white men, then gradually her power of speech in English returned until she could talk brokenly and remember a few English words. She finally recalled her name, Maud Gillespie, and her mother. They asked her if she wished to go back to her mother. She said she did, and they communicated with her people and she went back to them, a woman almost thirty years old. She had gone away a little girl of thirteen, fond of her mother, and constantly talking or singing in her childish way. She returned a silent, reserved woman, with the habits and manner and speech of an Indian. She had lost her language, she had become an Indian. Gradually her people are winning her back. It is like taming a wild creature, but eventually the inborn instincts will assert themselves, and much of the Indian life will fall away. They have been teaching her to speak her own language again, and she readily learned anew the songs she sang as a little child.

"This loss of language is a singular thing. I met an Englishman in South America who had lost his language, and he was distressed almost to distraction because of it. I have seen other cases, too, passing strange."

While there is a huge difference between the "more than forty years" the newspaper clipping claims and the fifteen years stated in Murry's memoir (memoirs themselves are imperfect recollections, and there is even some confusion regarding the memoir itself *), and this clipping was apparently published some 30 years after Murray's memoir (did she return to her Native American life and they went looking for her again?), there at least seems to be some proof to the story of Maud Gillespie... Or it's a continuing spoof story.

In my research I also discovered that there is another Findlay connection: Ralph Findlay, who did have a brother named John, was murdered and Murray was on the case.

From the University of Toronto's biography of John Wilson Murray:

Murray’s effectiveness is demonstrated by the first case in which he was involved after taking up his full-time appointment, an inquiry into the murder of Ralph Findlay, a Lambton County farmer. While local constables scurried about seeking clues to the perpetrator, suspecting that it was a stranger surprised while stealing horses, the county attorney, Julius Poussett Bucke, demanded the assistance of the government detective. It was Murray, it appears, who wrung a confession from the dead man’s wife that she had assisted her lover in the deed.

You can read Murry's recollection of the events in chapter XV of his memoir, in which he dates the murder to September of 1875, and describes a rather noble John Findlay.

* According to the University of Toronto, the first published edition of Memoirs of a Great Detective: Incidents in the Life of John Wilson Murray was published in London in 1904, without a mention of Victor Speer; however Speer is identified (as compiler and editor respectively) in the Toronto and New York editions of the book the following year.

Albert Hofmann's Really Far Out Now

Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD and the first to synthesize psilocybin (the active constituent of 'magic mushrooms'), passed away on Tuesday Apr 29, 2008 at the age of 102 (at home, of a heart attack) .

Among other things Hofmann wrote LSD: Mein Sorgenkind (LSD: My Problem Child) and recorded a spoken word album, Lob des Schauens (In Praise of Observation).

This is primarily a sex history blog and I know nothing to share with you about Hofmann's sex life -- but I'm pretty damn sure as a user of psychedellics, he had a great sex life.

You can find more about Hofmann's work at The Albert Hofmann Foundation.

Image via beinArt's LSD: Alex Grey on Albert Hofmann.

Sin & Redemption Radio Show

Tonight on Cult of Gracie Radio, the guest is Randall Radic, also known as 'Father Felony' or 'Daddy Radic,' is the Ripon, CA pastor who pleaded guilty to embezzlement after he sold the First Congregational Church without the knowledge of his congregation.

As the ad on the sidebar says, Grumpy Old Bookman wrote, "if you want to read a (fairly truthful) book by a priest who is a convicted felon and has had eight fiancees & two wives, & a very complicated set of relationships... then this is for you."

It promises to be a very interesting show.

About Randall: His recently released memoir, The Sound Of Meat (published by Ephemera Bound) covers his earlier life as a professional swim coach and priest, including his eight fiancees & two wives. "I used to try and save souls without ever examining my own," says Radic. Now, with this memoir, he puts pen to his mission, voice to his sin, sadism to his redemption.

Just go here at 9 p.m. (central) tonight, and press the orange button to listen live! Call in at (347) 838-8467

Can't be there live? Watch the Cult of Gracie blog for post-show info and downloads!

Dorothy Kilgallen, Taking It On The Chin

I am rather obsessed with watching the old What's My Line? & I've Got A Secret episodes. The shows' charms lay as much in the panelists themselves as it does with the guests (including "famous" folks I've never heard of) and, of course, the numerous delights that such vintage television provides. I've mentioned my delight in calling panelists names, simply because of what I'm continually discovering about them, but sometimes I'm just darn cruel.

For example, I'm so rigorous in my negative comments about panelist Dorothy Kilgallen's chin, saying things like, "I must Google to see if there's record of the incident with a horse that must have stepped on her face," that hubby was starting to become immune to them.

But now I feel badly about that... And not because hubby rolls his eyes at me with silent judgement for my rudeness or with boredom.

In deciding to investigate Kilgallen's chin, I discovered that Frank Sinatra and I held the same views on it. Performing in Vegas, Old Blue Eyes called her "the chinless wonder", and at the Copa, he said, "everyone in New York is here tonight except for Dorothy Kilgallen... she's out looking for her chin." Just more to love, or hate, about Sinatra, depending your personal views on the man.

But in discovery of such statements, I learned more about Dorothy Kilgallen, history, culture -- and myself -- than I ever could have imagined.

Kilgallen was more deeply entrenched in the romantic, mysterious, fascinating world of the late 50's and 60's that I prefer to live in, at least research wise.

Kilgallen left a small Hollywood career for that of a journalist. She was not only a gossip columnist, but a crime journalist -- which makes her more than the stereotypical female press person you think of, but a woman ahead of her times pursuing a profession deemed unsuitable for females. She also became the first woman to fly around the world.

But more than this, she was a woman. A woman who, lonely in her marriage to a cheating husband, turned to singer Johnnie Ray, a man 14 years younger than she, for what would be not only a passionate love affair, but a long-term one as well. This is where the feud with Sinatra is said to be at least partially rooted:

Sinatra had loathed Johnnie Ray from the moment the young musical upstart hit the scene. Ray's conquest of the pop charts in '51 (the top three spots all at once occupied by the same artist) had come at a time when the once (and soon to be again) successful Sinatra couldn't draw headlines unless it was for indulging in his penchant for punching paparazzi. So in '51, Frank was outraged to see that his place in pop music's upper echelon had been replaced by a skinny, half-deaf, androgynous cry-baby who all the scandal sheets proclaimed as a raging homosexual, and he was further incensed by the fact that the love of his life Ava Gardner had a star-struck obsession with the singer. Frank harbored a lifelong grudge.

Dorothy Kilgallen had been less than flattering to Sinatra in her popular opinion columns, citing his violent behavior and brooding public persona.

All of this melted my cold negative commenting heart a bit, but there is more.

As a gossip columnist in this time period, it would only be natural that Dorothy would know of and write stories about Marilyn Monroe. But I didn't know that she was one of the first to write of Monroe in some rather surprising ways, including her death:

On Aug. 3, 1962, Kilgallen became the first journalist to refer publicly to Marilyn Monroe's relationship with a Kennedy. Within 48 hours, Marilyn was found dead of a drug overdose at her Los Angeles residence. The inquiry into her death was marred by numerous unanswered questions and contradictions in the medical findings.* Dorothy publicly challenged the authorities with tough questions. For instance, she wrote, "If the woman described as Marilyn's 'housekeeper' [Eunice Murray] was really a housekeeper, why was her bedroom such a mess? It was a small house and should have been easy to keep tidy." Kilgallen also wanted to know "why was Marilyn's door locked that night, when she didn't usually lock it? If she were just trying to get to sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually people sleep better in the dark." And she asked, "Why did the first doctor [to arrive on the scene] have to call the second doctor before calling the police? Any doctor, even a psychiatrist, knows a dead person when he sees one, especially when rigor mortis has set in and there are marks of lividity on the surface of the face and body. Why the consultation? Why the big time gap in such a small town? Mrs. Murray gets worried at about 3 a.m., and it's almost 6 a.m. before the police get to the scene."

Kilgallen wrote that "the real story hasn't been told, not by a long shot." Such bold reporting was not common in American journalism at that time.

In a case of what can now surely be called foreshadowing, this is eerily similar to the death of Kilgallen herself, just a few years later.

On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her own home. A death with equally strange details, powerful connections, and a poor investigation of its very own.

She was found by her hairstylist, Marc Sinclaire, who after discovering her, told friend Charles Simpson, "When I tell you the bed she was found in, and how I found her, you're going to know she was murdered."

Things amiss include:

Kilgallen not sleeping in that room or bed.

A woman who was normally cold, putting the air conditioning on when it was cold outside.

Kilgallen routinely slept in pajamas and old socks, no make up etc., yet she was found not only wearing a peignoir set, but with hair and makeup in place as if she were going out.

Kilgallen had a book, The Honey Badger, by Robert Ruark, laid out on the bed next to her, but not only was it not in the proper position for her if she was reading it, it was a book she'd already finished reading & discussed with friends -- and while Dorothy needed glasses to read, they weren't found in the room.

There was a drink on the nightstand by the bed, but where Kilgallen sat, it was out of reach.

Oh, and while we're at it, those first at the scene say there was a piece of paper by the door, eluded to by some as a suicide note, but it was never produced and no one claims to have read it.

While there are many other curious things about the way cause of death was noted (and by whom), the story officially touted is that Kilgallen, like Monroe, had over-dosed, either as a suicide or more likely by accident.

As Kilgallen wrote about Monroe, why would a woman seeking to sleep, wear an outfit she never wore, put herself in a room so cold as to be uncomfortable, not remove her eyelashes -- or at least the very uncomfortable to lean upon hair pieces, get a book she's not only already read but then not bring along her glasses, and put a drink (medicated or not) on a table near the bed but then place herself such that she would not be able to reach it easily? And all this in a room she didn't sleep in?

Curiosity only grows when one discovers what Kilgallen had been doing in the years between Monroe's death and Kilgallen's own.

Just months after Monroe's death, on November 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated and Kilgallen was not only upset by the event, but was investigating it. She didn't believe the Oswald story at all, and when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, she arranged to have a private interview with Ruby.

No one is certain what was said in that interview, but Kilgallen often said she had something big, which would crack the JFK investigation wide -- and then some. She continued not only to investigate, but pen columns about it too, and it was said that the Ruby interview and other details would be published in her forthcoming book, Murder One, which was contracted to write for fellow What's My Line? panelist, Bennett Cerf, & Random House -- published without any such chapter(s) after her death. Kilgallen's file of notes on all this, seen by a number of persons, has yet to surface. Both the known and unknown details are fascinating -- and the stuff for conspiracy theorists, such as this article, Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen? by Robert Morningstar.

As easily drawn into such things as I can be, I'm leaving the threads here for you to follow-up as you choose, while I continue a different path.

What strikes me, shames me too, are other thoughts....

I don't like to reduce people, especially women, to such symbolic status that their humanity is removed, but in this case, Marilyn and Dorothy represent far more than just themselves.



While not complete mirror opposites, it's clear they each offer moments upon which to reflect upon their differences. Marilyn Monroe's wish for the sort of respect and admiration Dorothy Kilgallen had is widely documented. And Dorothy, who loved opulent surroundings and personal glamour, likely wished, at least from time to time, for some of Marilyn's beauty and to be seen and coveted in such terms. Neither was granted their wishes, of course, but such personal and private dreams are larger than just these two women.

If the woman of beauty, a man's plaything, is understood to matter less in this world, her afterlife continues to grow her legend. Monroe's beauty & status as sex icon only gathers more strength, even if she herself is batted about and accepted as a pawn at the whims of men and society.

If a woman's intelligence, however threatening, is supposed to matter more than earthy beauty, why is Kilgallen the less known? Her valor and strength are not reported and commented upon, even upon the anniversaries of her death. She is not revered -- in fact, she's nearly lost to history already.

We may never know what happened to each of these women. Their stories may or may not be tied to such grand crimes and cover-ups as the conspiracy theorists argue. But the really horrific facts are the if, how, and why these women are remembered. Conspiracy cover-ups aside, our collective societal values have been uncovered, and I do not like what I see.

Or what I myself have said and done with comments about Dorothy's chin.

If you can hear me now, Dorothy, you have my most sincere apologies.

For more on Dorothy Kilgallen:

What's My Line?: Daly & Dorothy... The Stalwart & The Tragedy (scroll to mid-page for the start of Kilgallen's story)

One of the most discussed books on Kilgallen's death is Kilgallen: A Biography of Dorothy Kilgallen, by Lee Israel.

The book was rumored to be made into a film, with, according to Johnnie Ray in a 1981 interview, Shirley MacLaine to play Dorothy Kilgallen (and David Bowie to play Johnnie Ray). Here's what Johnnie Ray had to say about the book and the matter of Dorothy's death:



Also of interest, at least to me, is this book: Johnnie Ray and Miss Kilgallen, by Bonnie Hill.

You can watch the first episode of What's My Line? aired after Dorothy's death (Part One, which Daly's comments, Part Two, Part Three, with the panelists' comments on Dorothy's passing as part of their nightly good-byes).

See also, Kilgallen's connections to Dr. Sam Sheppard's trial.

Earl Kemp On Science Fiction

Continuing my talk with Earl Kemp.

SPS: On paper, or in this digital age with sites like Wikipedia, "Earl Kemp" begins with science fiction. We hear the 'worked as a graphics artist' and then it's the fanzines, editing, etc.. How do you remember this transition?

Earl: As moving into adulthood and into the real world. Being born again with a view into reality.

SPS: What was it about science fiction which made you so passionate about the genre?

Earl: Just got hooked completely. Still am. Can't escape it.

SPS: Don't play coy; tell me what it was that hooked you. I want to hear about 'the golden age' or 'new wave' from someone who experienced it then -- both in terms of stories and the community.

Earl: I'm not ready to rethink backward for more than half a century. Too much trouble. Too little reward.

SPS: Whatever it was that grabbed you, did so by the heart if not the throat because you've been so passionate about the genre... Surely it deserves an ode, if not a few lines of description, yes?

Earl: Of course it does. But it was mostly the people involved at the time. Vastly different than the people involved today. To begin with, they cared. They involved themselves with each other. There was no distinction between fans and pros. It was family.

It hasn't been family now for...what...40 years. These days it's mostly media hype pushing for profits for total crap. But big profits and even bigger crap. Pros now are isolated from their fans, too aloof even to wipe their own asses. And most of them are in desperate need of talent, editors, and especially proofreaders....

SPS: Does any of what hooked you remain for you in the science fiction of today?

Earl: Good heavens NO. Pale shadow of its former self. For me, little or no adventure. People like Dean Koontz and Stephen King have totally destroyed both writing and sf. Crap abounds.

SPS: So they are the answer to Who Killed Science Fiction? I was taught it was Sputnik. lol

Earl: No, that was strictly the failure of periodical distributors crashing under their own weight. Had nothing to do with Sputnik.

SPS: There is quite a resurgence in sf -- you must be aware of that with all the hands reaching for you. Are there writers/works today you are fond of or at least feel capture some of that whateveritwas which first hooked you?

Earl: Contemporary sf escapes me totally. At the same time I find myself doing far too much reading. I had to give that up as a professional editor because there was no time for me, just for work.

Now I'm rereading lots of old favorites and running the whole gamut of contemporary bestselling fiction. I find most of it to be very formulaic...following largely the formula we created for Greenleaf Classic, as strange as it seems. And with a heavy tilt toward female readers who just have to have a go at that incredibly handsome but somewhat naive hunk, hung like a donkey...who will be totally their's before the last chapter closes.

SPS: What would it take for you to return to editing? Anthologies maybe? You've been writing your memoirs, online; any plans for a book -- a print book?

Earl: Always plans. Just waiting for the right person/thing/happening.

SPS: What would the right thing be? Would it have more to do with feeling part of a community, concern/caring for the work and the genre, or money?

Earl: None of these would be motivational except perhaps money. As prices go up, I have to buy/use less. Plus, at my age I'm much too cynical about my abilities to generate enough energy for any occupation. Only hedonistic motives could push me beyond current resting.

SPS: Do you think there is hope for such a sf community again? The Internet and blogging certainly can help with this, right? Or do you feel that ego/money/personality are still in the way preventing such a thing from happening again?

Earl: All media is different these days. Sort of like corporations running the country. Nothing is ever for the benefit of the writers or the readers any more. Unreadable books, banal television, unwatchable films...all selling like crazy.

SPS: So you don't really see anything positive about the Internet -- offering individuals less expensive voices, & ease in connection? Maybe you just feel that way because it allows any ID hiding slob with an email address to contact you.

Earl: You're mistaken. I think the Internet is one of the best things that's come along in ages. I couldn't live without it. Especially the less expensive part, although where I live, with NO option except dial-up that costs too damned much, really makes me miss big city living with competition and facilities that work occasionally.

I don't like subterfuge of any sort. Even usernames are insulting.

SPS: Personally, I too dislike the dishonesty of usernames. I hide behind mine because of the implications for family. Talking with you makes me feel more than a bit ashamed. Not just your finger waggin' but the life you lived. You didn't buckle or run away; you faced things. But I've tired, already, of being the tallest nail. Like you, I too hum Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose -- only I know that I still have something to lose and I'm not willing to pay that price.

Oh, I know I am on lists. Have been prior to W. My battles were smaller, more personal; yours were larger, more public. I hope someday to appear valiant in attempt if not victorious in action in my own history, a family legend; but you already are a legend.

This is part of The Collective Adoration Of Earl Kemp. Those who reach out to you want to rub the Buddha's belly, hoping some of that moxy will rub off. You don't describe yourself with much aggression and valor, but we see it.

As for the other reasons to from an Earl Kemp Mutual Admiration Society, I think they all lead back to passion. Certainly there was a passion behind standing up for Big Beliefs -- 10 years of government stalking gave you plenty of time to reconsider the personal cost. But there also is a passion for writing, the sf genre and the community. No one can describe Earl Kemp as apathetic. Even while you mock & paint yourself as the tired man of so many years, here you are.

In an age of apathy, what's not to admire about Earl Kemp.

And no, dear editor, I am not missing a question mark.

Earl: Flattery will get you absolutely anything.

To be continued...

All photos from Earl Kemp & his zine; used with written permission. Cover of Sin Chained, via Vintage Sleaze's Greenleaf Catalog.

Petty & Grand Books In 1957

From a 1957 Good Housekeeping, a 'picks and pans' on books:

Francoise Sagan, poor dear, had two of her three books panned. Thus she is the “petty” in the Petty and Grand.

But Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was “grand”.

She even had her photo included in the feature.

Another excellent CQ post on the context of magazines and pop culture. Read it.

Where There's A Will...

Will Straw, PhD, Department of Art History and Communications Studies professor spotted my Hollywood Follies post and sent me an email requesting some information.

While I dig around in my collection (I have a system, but it's not very friendly to research requests like this), Will has allowed me to share his email so that any here with info can help.

Hi -- I was googling "Wayne Sabbath" and, after five pages of references to religious books, found your site, with the scans from Hollywood Follies. Thanks for those. I've been trying to reconstruct the career of Wayne and of his partner (who may, in fact, be him) "Cap'n Joey"/Jo Burten, who published spicy magazines from the 1920s onwards. Burten's Follies was the best known of these, and "Follies" turns up in many of his titles. The last record of any of them I can find is a reference to Joe getting busted c. 1959 for obscenity. Do you know any more about these guys?

In any case, thanks for the interesting read,
Will

If you have any info please post it here and/or contact Will via contact info on his webpage.

At the risk of distracting you...

Readers may be delighted to know that Will is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America, a history of true crime magazines in America with an emphasis on its visual content, including 196 color illustrations. The book is also available at Photo-Eye and the Andrew Roth Gallery; a review, with a slide show, can be found at Men's Vogue, and you can download the book's introduction (PDF) here.


Will also writes the Canadian culture blog at McGill.

** Don't forget! If you have any information on Wayne Sabbath, "Cap'n Joey" Jo Burten. or the follies publications, please let us know!

Elsie de Wolfe

Most folks think "Lesbian" and "decorator" when they hear the name Elsie de Wolfe, but she was also an avid promoter of cancer-sticks -- and not just with ads like this Lucky Stikes ad (in the Delineator, February 1929) either.



When Elsie said, "I recommend a Lucky in place of a sweet - when your figure must be considered," she meant it. She wrote a book on it too: Elsie De Wolfe's Recipes for Successful Dining (1934).

Of course, one must remember that smoking was not just fashionable; such promotion was well compensated.

For more on Elsie, see Band of Thebes birthday tribute where they say, "Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings."

Collecting News & Views

Norman Mailer passed away, and DeeDee (and others) share their thoughts on the ambitious writer whose giant ego oft overshadowed his written works.

Heidi Fleiss fluffs & folds to pass the time as she awaits the ability to open her Stud Farm (meanwhile, you gents can apply for a position with Heidi).

And lastly, from whence the image comes, Derek talks about the context of collecting music compilations. I note it because A) it furthers what I wrote about here, and B) it has the Promfumo scandal. (So I may just have to add that record to my collection.)

Info On Collecting Vintage Risque Items

Over at CQ:

A review of Classic Images magazine.

And did you know that famed horse illustrator/author C.W. Anderson did risque works too?

Naughty Bookstore Adventures

I don't normally cover the same beat as Fleshbot, but this post, "J.K. Rowling inadvertently reveals her Chamber of Secrets", was amusing.

It made me think of several things, including how our sexuality is stamped by seemingly small events, how we currently freak out over the sight of a bra when bikinis bare more, and yes, of my customers in bookstores.

Speaking of dirty magazine purchases:

I hadn’t much done porn or erotic magazines for a few years and wasn’t really aware how things had moved on, so I was surprised, maybe even shocked at what I saw. It wasn’t the nude male body that made me jump, it was the erect cocks, some shown close up. I didn’t want to look at it too interestedly at that stage, but I was seriously intrigued.

Many of us hung around in a trendy and alternative bookshop near the campus. The next week I noticed they stocked the magazine. I’ve never been someone that doesn’t have the nerve to do things like that. Once I’ve made my mind up, I go for it. The female assistant got it down from the shelf, looking as if she felt right-on that she was so OK with gay men. I didn’t try to explain.

All the way home the magazine burned a hole in my jacket. I felt this way when I first bought a mainstream porn magazine from a station newsagent at the age of about 14 and on the way to stay with relatives. I had the same concerns then about being knocked over by a bus on the way home and being found carrying the magazine, and took extra care to avoid this. If the government really wanted a novel way to improve road safety, I’d suggest making everyone carry a shameful magazine.

In deep cushions redolent of perfume

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857). Along with every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal (each with its multiple English translations, most of which are exclusive to the site and are now available in digital form for the first time ever), the site contains audio recordings of the poems read in their original French.

This wonderful site also contains Les Épaves (1866). Les Épaves is a collection of miscellaneous poetry along with the six of his poems censored from the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. These poems were illegal to publish in France until the 1940s.

One of my favorites of the censored six is Femmes damnés (À la pâle clarté). There have been several translations of it but the below is my favorite -- and all because of the line,In deep cushions redolent of perfume". It just feels best.

Damned Women

Delphine and Hippolyta

In the pallid light of languishing lamps,
In deep cushions redolent of perfume,
Hippolyta dreamed of the potent caresses
That drew aside the veil of her young innocence.

She was seeking, with an eye disturbed by the storm,
The already distant skies of her naiveté,
Like a voyager who turns to look back
Toward the blue horizons passed early in the day.

The listless tears from her lacklustrous eyes,
The beaten, bewildered look, the dulled delight,
Her defeated arms thrown wide like futile weapons,
All served, all adorned her fragile beauty.

Lying at her feet, calm and filled with joy,
Delphine gazed at her hungrily, with burning eyes,
Like a strong animal watching a prey
Which it has already marked with its teeth.

The strong beauty kneeling before the frail beauty,
Superb, she savored voluptuously
The wine of her triumph and stretched out toward the girl
As if to reap her reward of sweet thankfulness.

She was seeking in the eyes of her pale victim
The silent canticle that pleasure sings
And that gratitude, sublime and infinite,
Which the eyes give forth like a long drawn sigh.

"Hippolyta, sweet, what do you think of our love?
Do you understand now that you need not offer
The sacred burnt-offering of your first roses
To a violent breath which could make them wither?

My kisses are as light as the touch of May flies
That caress in the evening the great limpid lakes,
But those of your lover will dig furrows
As a wagon does, or a tearing ploughshare;

They will pass over you like heavy teams
Of horses or oxen, with cruel iron-shod hooves...
Hippolyta, sister! please turn your face to me,
You, my heart and soul, my all, half of my own self,

Turn toward me your eyes brimming with azure and stars!
For one of those bewitching looks, O divine balm,
I will lift the veil of the more subtle pleasures
And lull you to sleep in an endless dream!"

Hippolyta then raised her youthful head:
"I am not ungrateful and I do not repent,
Delphine darling; I feel restless and ill,
As I do after a rich midnight feast.

I feel heavy terrors pouncing on me
And black battalions of scattered phantoms
Who wish to lead me onto shifting roads
That a bloody horizon shuts in on all sides.

Is there something strange in what we have done?
Explain if you can my confusion and my fright:
I shudder with fear when you say: 'My angel!'
And yet I feel my mouth moving toward you.

Do not look at me that way, you, my dearest thought:
The sister of my choice whom I'd love forever
Even if you were an ambush prepared for me
And the beginning of my perdition."

Delphine, shaking her tragic mane and stamping her foot
As if she were stamping on the iron Tripod,
Her eyes fatal, replied in a despotic voice:
"Who dares to speak of hell in the presence of love?

May he be cursed forever, that idle dreamer,
The first one who in his stupidity
Entranced by a sterile, insoluble problem,
Wished to mix honesty with what belongs to love!

He who would unite in a mystic harmony
Coolness with warmth and the night with the day
Will never warm his palsied flesh
With that red sun whose name is love!

Go if you wish and find a stupid sweetheart, run
To offer your virgin heart to his cruel kisses;
Full of remorse and horror, and livid,
You will bring back to me your stigmatized breasts...

Woman here below can serve only one master!"
But the girl pouring out the vast grief in her heart,
Suddenly cried: "I feel opening within me
A yawning abyss; that abyss is my heart!

Burning like a volcano and deep as the void!
Nothing will satiate that wailing monster
Nor cool the thirst of the Eumenides
Who with torch in hand burn his very blood.

Let our drawn curtains separate us from the world
And let lassitude bring to us repose!
I want to bury my head in your deep bosom
And find in your breast the cool of the tomb!"

— Go down, go down, lamentable victims,
Go down the pathway to eternal hell!
Plunge to the bottom of the abyss where all crime
Whipped by a wind that comes not from heaven,

Boil pell-mell with the sound of a tempest.
Mad shades, run to the goal of your desires;
You will never be able to sate your passion
And your punishment will be born of your pleasures.

Never will a cool ray light your caverns;
Through the chinks in the walls feverish miasmas
Filter through, burst into flame like lanterns
And permeate your bodies with frightful odors.

The bleak sterility of your pleasures
Increases your thirst and makes your skin taut
And the raging wind of carnal desire
Makes your flesh snap like an old flag.

Damned, wandering, far from living people,
Roam like the wolves across the desert waste;
Fulfill your destinies, dissolute souls,
And flee the infinite you carry in your hearts!

-- William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)


Should this poem not move you to click and visit fleursdumal.org for more of the Charles Baudelaire's works, here's a seductive snippet of the poet's biography:

One of the greatest French poets of the 19th century, called 'the father of modern criticism,' who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire formed with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine the so-called Decadents. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In LE PEINTRE DE LA VIE MODERNE (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) Baudelaire argued in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy, was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic.

Still not fascinated? (What's wrong with you?!)

How about this: Baudelaire was a translator of Poe's works, an opium addict, an art critic, sympathetic of prostitutes, and a man who worshipped his mother.

While Baudelaire never married, his long-time relationship with Jeanne Duval (a Creole woman, actress, and dancer) suggests that even if he didn't love her -- that he only viewed her as "the archetype of the sexually exciting exotic woman" and could only regard "her as the personification of the animal-like, of the natural" -- he was intensely devoted to his muse, his "Black Venus".



(Though the authors of the above link may be operating off of faulty information. The painting by Edouard Manet may not be of Jeanne Duval but rather of "an unidentified "Adele" referred to in Baudelaire's journal, or one of the casual acquaintances the poet encountered after he terminated his relationship with his long-time mulatto mistress in 1861." Others argue the 'odd' painting style was the style Baudelaire preferred -- he was not sympathetic to realism) It is clear, however, that the two spent over two stormy decades with one another -- before each died of syphilis.


Baudelaire viewed himself as a fallen angel, so perhaps it's no surprise that he died in his mother's arms on August 31, 1867, in a Paris clinic.

Sketches by Charles Baudelaire via Art.com.


Baudelaire's grave and cenotaph are at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

Vintage Book Ads

Via the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times (on hiatus until next week) comes this lovely collection of Book Ads: The Golden Age, 1962-73. These are some of my favorites.



June 27, 1968

Rex Reed was at the top of his game in the summer of 1968, when this ad for a collection of his show-business essays and profiles appeared in the daily Times. Reed was a celebrated New Journalist, the next Tom Wolfe. But it still made commercial sense to drag Jacqueline Susann into the mix. She was fresh from the success of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966), which sold more than 19 million copies. Reed's collection was reviewed in the Book Review by Nora Ephron, who began her piece this way: “Rex Reed is a saucy, snoopy, bitchy man who sees with sharp eyes and writes with a mean pen and succeeds in making voyeurs of us all. If any of this sounds as if I don't like Rex Reed, let me correct that impression. I love Rex Reed.”

Oct. 27, 1968

“Hanoi” was the second of three books Mary McCarthy wrote about the Vietnam War — the others were “Vietnam” (1967) and “Medina” (1972). All three would later be gathered into one volume, “The Seventeenth Degree.” McCarthy's trip to Hanoi was not met with outrage, as Jane Fonda's would be four years later. But many critics chafed at her rosy portrait of North Vietnam. In Time magazine, a reviewer wrote that “Hanoi” suffered from “a Lincoln Steffens I-have-seen-the-future-and-it-works naïveté.”

See more in the slideshow.

Keats Still Inspires

Show here is a reproduction of The Townley Urn "made famous by the inspired poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats (1795-1821)."

Keats still inspires, and as Secondhand Rose says, the poem explains the bliss of orgasm denial.

Now that's art.

Via Gloria Brame.

A Study In Victorian (Printed) Erotica

Grumpy Old Bookman discusses Victorian pornography. This third part focuses on an intriguing 1882 publication called The Mysteries of Verbena House.

The subtitle is 'Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving', which, if you know anything about Victorian porn, speaks for itself.

The book was published privately, in a print run of 150 copies. The price was four guineas, a sum which you can probably multiply by 100 to get today's equivalent price (perhaps US$600). This, of course, placed it far beyond the reach of the vulgar crowd.

The cost at the time would be the equivalent of two weeks pay now. Which as we know from the banned books post, wasn't uncommon -- either price them out of range, or mark them for "private collections" or the medical community, and you're publishing-ass was covered.

So speaking as a collector, the limited number of copies then leads to an even less abundant number of books now -- far, far out of my reach. (Though I too have spotted French versions now and then.) So the closest I may ever come to knowing this book is via Grumpy. Viva La Internet.

His post is full of mystery, as (perhaps only) the literate and astute (collectors &/or researchers) can really appreciate. I am so 'there.'

One thing I noted from Grumpy's post was this bit on Algernon Swinburne:

And Swinburne was yet another Victorian who, as a result of his experience at Eton, was totally obsessed by flagellation. Though in his case his interest was masochist rather than sadistic; his sole sexual interest was in being the slave of a beautiful, violent woman.

Apparently this making of a Dom or sub is a very common English school phenomenon which continues today.

Just another reason for a kinky American to wish to travel abroad. (Of course, I mean to look for the books. Or speak with Grumpy Old Bookman. *wink*)

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, And Little Girls

It is generally said that Alice Pleasance Liddell (1852-1934), daughter of Henry George Liddell (Dean of Christ Church, Oxford), was the inspiration for don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ('Lewis Carroll') Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and that the in manuscript was given to her as a Christmas present in 1864.




However, there have been questions as to the relationship between Alice and Carroll. In fact, some question Carroll's desire for and relationship with other children. This based largely upon Carroll's photography.




In PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Girls Loved Him, Pedophile or Not Sarah Boxer writes:

''His were sad, scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade,'' said Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian translator of Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'' Nabokov noticed ''a pathetic affinity'' between Carroll, who photographed little girls clothed and naked, and Humbert Humbert, the pedophilic narrator of his own ''Lolita.''

But was Carroll a pedophile? As you walk through ''Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition,'' organized by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin to mark his death in 1898 and now at the Equitable Gallery in Manhattan, the question seems oddly irrelevant. What is most startling, and attractive, in his portraits of girls is not what he saw in them but what they saw in him.

''Lewis Carroll . . . came to our country home to photograph the children,'' wrote Dymphna Ellis, one of the children Carroll photographed. She added: ''I feel sure I was a 'favorite.' He made every child that. He developed the photographs in our cellar . . . I remember the mess and the mystery . . . We cried when he went away . . . We were absolutely fearless with him. We felt he was one of us, and on our side against all the grown-ups.''

These don't sound like the words of a victim of childhood seduction. But something in them is still alarming: cellar, mess, mystery, fearless. The words make you think that whatever Carroll and his little subjects were up to, it was exciting and seductive for all concerned. They were co-conspirators.

In The Man Who Loved Little Girls, Ada Calhoun sums up our creepy feelings:

This aspect of Carroll's life raised a few eyebrows in his day, but speculation about it has intensified with the passing of time. Certainly Carroll idolized girls, wrote his stories down because they told him to, photographed them frequently. A brilliant and talented man, Carroll nevertheless had difficulty interacting with anyone who had hit puberty. He had a bad stutter around most adults and surrounded himself with armies of little girls. He is famously quoted as saying, "I am fond of children (except boys)," and photographed many pretty little girls -- some languidly stretched out on a bed, some nude. As a result, Lewis Carroll has a vaguely icky aura about him in some people's minds, leading to pop-culture references of a nasty nature.

Calhoun continues:

The nude form Carroll found especially inspiring, and while the HRHRC exhibit contains none of the nude photos themselves -- most of the few that survive reside at Princeton -- there are in the exhibit seven letters which Carroll wrote to Mrs. Annie Wood Gray Henderson between the years 1879 and 1881 about using her daughters Annie and Francis as nude models. In one, Carroll writes: "Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred." There was at the same time a reluctance to use boys in the same context. The girls' younger brother posed early on but in another of the letters Carroll said that the boy was not invited back to sit the next year because "a boy's head soon imbibes precocious ideas ... It is hard to say how soon the danger might not arise."

Calhoun, then continues to share the thoughts of Morton Cohen, a preeminent Carroll scholar, who belives that Carroll "remained beyond reproach in his behavior."

In interviews that Cohen conducted in the 1960s with some six or eight of the little old ladies who were once Carroll's child-friends, none of them ever said anything (even when pressed for the gory details) but that he was the nicest, the most gentle, charming, delightful, etc., etc., man they had ever known. Though Cohen believes that Carroll may indeed have wanted to marry one or more of the girls at various times, they came of age and it never happened. By all accounts, Carroll died celibate.

Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll Collector, Consultant, Researcher, and Writer, also champions Carroll.

In The Real Lewis Carroll, A Talk given to the Lewis Carroll Society (April 2003), says:

Let me list, in my view, the ten most frequently used myths about Dodgson – in no particular order of merit or level of controversy:

1. He was shy and ill at ease in the company of adults

2. He only liked little girls; he did not like little boys

3. There was a major split with the Liddell family in 1863

4. His relationship with his illustrator, John Tenniel, was strained and terminated after the publication of Through the Looking-Glass

5. He visited Alice Liddell at Llandudno and this inspired him to write Alice

6. He was a mediocre mathematician

7. He was a bad stammerer, but lost his stammer in the company of children

8. He wanted to marry Alice Liddell

9. His relationship with children was unhealthy

10. He gave up photography as a result of scandalous gossip.

There are other more spurious and far-fetched accusations such as the following which I will ignore and treat with the contempt they deserve:

11. He was Jack the Ripper

12. He had an affair with Alice’s mother

13. He didn’t write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at all - Queen Victoria did!

If I am going to convince you that these statements about Dodgson are mythical and untrue, I will need to provide you with strong and compelling evidence. This I am able to do. I shall use the primary source of his diaries to support my arguments, and the research material I have uncovered in order to edit them thoroughly. It will be a major task because most of you will have read various biographies, so these ideas will already be accepted and adopted as true. But I don’t mind the challenge. And, of course, it doesn’t really matter if you disbelieve what I say. If I just unsettle a few of your views and opinions concerning the real character of Dodgson, I shall be content.

Was Carroll inappropriate? Did he have inappropriate thoughts? We likely will never know... But it's worthy of questioning. Some turn to the cultural differences between 'now' and Victorian times for the answers. But that, my friends, will have to be another post.





Images via here and here. None of the nude images are to be found online -- I imagine that is by design.

For more information, see LookingForLewisCarroll.com, 'Everything is Queer To-day': Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Jungian Looking-Glass and Dreamchild.

Bataille and Bellmer: The Eyes Have It

I stumbled into JorgeRueda and was fascinated by the art shown.



I couldn't understand most of it, but I know what I like! So I turned to Google and did some research on the names.

Turns out these wicked erotic eye sketches are the work of Hans Bellmer, and were used in 1946 to illustrate Histoire de L'oeil, intaglio, a translation of Story of the Eye.



Story of the Eye was credited to Lord Auch, a pseudonym of Georges Bataille's. Story of the Eye was Bataille's first novel, published in 1928. There were four editions, the first in 1928 and three others, known as the "new version" because it is so very different from the first, came out in 1940, 1941, and 1967.

Here's a bit of Part One, The Tale, Chapter One: The Cat's Eye:

I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual. I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl my own age, at the beach in X. Our families being distantly related, we quickly grew intimate. Three days after our first meeting, Simone and I were alone in her villa. She was wearing a black pinafore with a starched white collar. I began realizing that she shared my anxiety at seeing her, and I felt even more anxious that day because I hoped she would be stark naked under the pinafore.

She had black silk stockings on covering her knees, but I was unable to see as far up as the cunt (this name, which I always used with Simone, is, I think, by far the loveliest of the names for the vagina). It merely struck me that by slightly lifting the pinafore from behind, I might see her private parts unveiled.

Now in the corner of a hallway there was a saucer of milk for the cat. "Milk is for the pussy, isn't it?" said Simone. "Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?"

"I dare you," I answered, almost breathless. The day was extremely hot. Simone put the saucer on a small bench, planted herself before me, and, with her eyes fixed on me, she sat down without my being able to see her burning buttocks under the skirt, dipping into the cool milk. The blood shot to my head, and I stood before her awhile, immobile and trembling, as she eyed my stiff cock bulging in my pants. Then I lay down at her feet without her stirring, and for the first time, I saw her "pink and dark" flesh cooling in the white milk. We remained motionless, on and on, both of us equally overwhelmed ....

Suddenly, she got up, and I saw the milk dripping down her thighs to the stockings. She wiped herself evenly with a handkerchief as she stood over my head with one foot on the small bench, and I vigorously rubbed my cock through the pants while writhing amorously on the floor. We reached orgasm at almost the same instant without even touching one another. But when her mother came home, I was sitting in a low armchair, and I took advantage of the moment when the girl tenderly snuggled in her mother's arms: I lifted the back of her pinafore, unseen, and thrust my hand under her cunt between her two burning legs.

I dashed home, eager to jerk off some more, and the next day there were such dark rings around my eyes that Simone, after peering at me for a while, buried her head in my shoulder and said earnestly: "I don't want you to jerk off anymore without me."

(You can -- and should -- go here to read the rest.)

Here, an Extract from Georges Bataille's Eroticism:

As often as not, it seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions. I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions...

...We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is... this nostalgia is responsible for... eroticism in man.

If you're like me, you're going to look for books by Georges Bataille.

Both Georges Bataille and Hans Bellmer will likely appear here again. *wink*

Top (Hat) Of The Mornin' To Ya

Hold the phone, I've got some great links for you this morning.

(Yeah, and I'm pandering the posed art nudes for ya.)

Found at Gloria Brame's blog, a list of Fine Art Nude, Figure, Glamour and Dance Photography books.

Ms Angela of Zen Fetish has posted three poems by e.e. cummings.

Gracie at Sex Kitten has an interesting post on the difficulties of being a sex-positive female publisher. Here's a bit of it:

"Playboy's been around, been accepted, for decades. Why not Sex Kitten?"

"Because Playboy's for men."

"And men can like sex, but women can't?"

"Of course, women can like sex; but men are supposed to like and talk about it more."

"But in Playboy the women, the centerfolds, admit they like sex ~ it's probably the only true part of their bios!"

"But it's still for men; male fantasies of women."

"So men are happier fantasizing that the women they are objectifying like sex than they are in accepting that real women they could screw like sex."

It's here where he becomes silent.

I can understand why; it's rather difficult to hear that outloud and neither want to accept it nor have a defense for it.

And while you're there, check out Masturbation, Bonding and The Threat To Society by DeeDee:

But unlike other basic drives, sex is different from food and water in that we can satisfy ourselves without actually achieving the goal of the drive. Arousal and orgasm can be achieved without contact with another human being yet be just as satisfying (at least in the physical needs department), while thirst and hunger may only be sated with water and food.

Images from the "stop reading dirty books" folder.

Shibari

Shibari is a Japanese style of bondage involving tying up the bottom in intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope which not only restrains the bottom, but provides the bottom pleasure from the pressure and strain of the ropes.

It's also an art form. And photographer Lee "Bridgett" Harrington likes to give classes on the subject, including Erotic Macramé Classes.

In an interview regarding the workshops, Harrington said:

Suffice it to say that shibari derived from rope restraints used on Japanese prisoners of war. "How it evolved into an erotic art, we're not quite sure, since the only earlier documentation we have are erotic woodcuts from the 1700s," she said.

You can find out more about the artist/performer/educator at Passion and Soul, in her blog, and see more photos at her website, RopeLover.com, and Black Book Art.

Memo to self: Must meet Lee "Bridgett" Harrington.

The Paintings of Alice B. Sheldon

After reading this review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, I ordered the book -- and I just finished it. An amazing book, an amazing life.

Curious about her earlier years, I've been searching Google and today I bring you this extraordinary woman's art.

Few of Alli's works exist on the web. These I found at the biographer, Julie Phillips' site. (One imagines that since I'm having difficulty locating Tiptree works at the thrift stores -- where I am normally quite lucky with old paperbacks -- that the art must be under lock and key. And for good reason.


In 1939, Alice (then Alice Davey) submitted a nude self-portrait to an exhibition of American painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This photo is from the show's catalog.

This next one I love the most, and not just for the nude woman either ;)


I love the lines, the darkness of it all. There's something tortured, yet warm about it. According to Phillips this watercolor is part of a series in which one of the others depicts soldiers marching beneath a monstrous caricature of Hitler.

I continue to search for and read more Tiptree Jr, et all. Of course, I shall post where I've consumed more ;)

Paulina Porizkova

In Are You There, God? It's Me, Paulina Radaronline.com dishes on supermodel Paulina Porizkova saying, "Former supermodel Paulina Porizkova leads an enviable life, with fame, money, looks, and a rock star husband to boot. Turns out all she ever really wanted to be was Judy Blume."

Porizkova's written a book, A Model Summer, due out this spring.

Best bit from the book (from the article) is: "I feel him harden again. Back in, back out. This time I count. Five thrusts before it's over. I'm beginning to feel like a mattress with a convenient hole. And it doesn't stop ... This sex thing is truly overrated; even Kafka would be more entertaining right now."

I'll probably get it not just because of it's promise, or the fact that I like knowing that pretty faces have literary minds, but because it once again gives me that chance to say her name.

I first 'met' Porizkova when she became the Lauder Girl and pushed Knowing perfume. Like many, I loved the sophisticated black-and-white ads, which unbeknownst to me helped transform Porizkova's public image from a swimsuit model to that of European sophisticate, and bought bucket-loads of the fragrance. She not only was beautiful, but typified myself in the late 80's and early 90's -- post Madonna, I was dropping my bangles, big hair and slutty girl attitude and wanted to project, if not be, a more elegant, sexy woman.

More fun than anything was to say her last name: Porizkova. With an accent, of course. I dare admit here, nameless and faceless so not accountable, that I used that name and accent out in bars. Porizkova. It still sounds so opulent rolling of my tongue... I may have to talk like that tonight at dinner.

Another thing to love Paulina for was her irreverence about the beauty and fashion industry. This no doubt due to the influence of her mother, Iva Parizkowa Ryggeståhl, being a liberal politician & leader in Sweden. Her disparaging remarks about the fashion and beauty industry, such as her beauty is "a matter of mathematics: the number of millimeters between the eyes and chin," and, "When I model I pretty much go blank. You can't think too much or it doesn't work," at once debunked and built myths about the beauty business.

Paulina, along with her physical beauty, is a well-read woman. Even at her most popular, the most quoted Porizkova statement was, "My boyfriend thinks I lost my true calling to be a librarian." For those of us who may not have had her look, we sure knew that reading was part of her sophistication. (Her love of reading bodes well for the book.) We justified that we wouldn't want to force our minds to go blank just to be a supermodel and marry a rock star anyway.

Marrying a rock star was tough too. Ocasek had a wife when they met, and Paulina didn't want to be the other woman, especially in the press. So they kept quiet and announced their love only after his divorce. But that didn't stop family from being angry. Paulina's been rather outspoken about the abuse she took as a step-mom with one of Rick's sons -- and about how she and that young man took his aggression out properly and bonded via martial arts. Talk about sophistication -- how many other women would have taken such a route?

Since Porizkova's book is touted to be somewhat autobiographical, I am looking forward to its release. I'm expecting it to be well-written and full of the Paulina I want to see looking back at her modeling days.

Sidney Sheldon Dies

Author Sidney Sheldon Dies at 89.

Sheldon mostly wrote about stalwart women who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men. His notable novels included "Rage of Angels," "The Other Side of Midnight," and "If Tomorrow Comes."

His books became the more suspensful equivalents of soap operas -- predictable in some regards, but boy wasn't it fun getting to the end anyway?



"I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down," he explained in a 1982 interview. "I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It's the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter."

Analyzing why so many women bought his books, he commented: "I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power — their femininity, because men can't do without it."

He also created and produced "I Dream of Jeannie," which lasted five seasons, 1965-1970. "During the last year of 'I Dream of Jeannie,' I decided to try a novel," he said in 1982. "Each morning from 9 until noon, I had a secretary at the studio take all calls. I mean every single call. I wrote each morning — or rather, dictated — and then I faced the TV business."

Many people forget Sheldon's movie career. He won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1947 for "The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer," starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple.

He also won a 1959 Tony Award for his musical "Redhead," and earned an Emmy Award for his work on "I Dream of Jeannie."

You can find out more at www.sidneysheldon.com.

Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler was the infamous woman at the center of the 1960's Profumo scandal in England (and it had it's American impact as well). Keeler had affairs with both John 'Jack' Profumo, war minister in Harold McMillan's Conservative government, and Eugene Ivanov, the assistant Naval Attache to the USSR embassy who was considered to be a spy by MI5. Obviously, this mix created quite a scandal. Keeler was just 19 years old when the smack went down.

But as always, there's a life which leads up to such events...

Christine Keeler grew up with her mother and stepfather in the Berkshire village of Wraysbury. The home was small and allowed little privacy. Although she was close to her mother, she felt threatened by her stepfather's attentions to the point where she kept a knife under her pillow in case he forced himself upon her.


In 1957, at the age of 15, Keeler commuted daily from Wraysbury to London for her job as a model at a dress shop in the Soho quarter. One day the shop's sweeper invited her to his flat... There, she lost her virginity in what she described as a non-stimulating experience.

At 16, Keeler was dating American GI's from military bases in her town of Wraysbury. One of the men, a black sergeant from Laleham Air Force base named Jim. Months after he had left for the states, Keeler discovered she was pregnant. She tried to abort the baby herself with a knitting needle and as expected, it was a bloody, traumaticatic mess. The child was not aborted, but born prematurely on 17 April 1959 and lived just six days.

That summer Keeler left Wraysbury, and an unhappy life, for a lifeexcitementment and adventure in London.

She waitressed at a restaurant in Baker Street where she soon met Maureen O'Connor, a girl who worked at Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho. O'Connor introduced Keeler to the owner, Percy Murray, who hired her almost immediately as a topless showgirl. Part of a showgirl's work then, as now, involved encouraging them to buy more drinks by sitting with the customers between acts.

One night, a rich Arab customer, accompanied by a starlet and another man, came to the club. The other man was Dr. Stephen Ward. Ward was a society osteopath who mixed in influential circles, presumably for introducing pretty party girls to the aristocratic set. Charming Keeler with compliments regarding how "wonderful" she was in the show, Ward wormed his way into getting her phone number.

The next day, Ward called Keeler three times; she blew him off. But he turned up at her family's home in Wraysbury and charmed her mother into Keeler giving him one date. On the second date Ward asked Keeler to move into his flat in Bayswater.

Keeler agreed; she was an attractive woman alone in a big city and Ward could give her security and companionship. Ward did not pester her for sex like most men, and Kereferredfered to their liarrangementsments as like that of a 'brother and sister'. Some time after meeting Ward, Keeler met a new dancer at the club, Mandy Rice-Davies.

Rice-Davies has been quoted as saying "It was dislike at first sight" and Keeler apparently felt the same, but as both girls found themselves at the same parties, they became companions if not friends. Not only did they compliment eachother well as far as personality, the two also worked well in the bedroom, earning themselves money for clothes and entertainment purposes.

During the scandal, Ward was charged with living on the "immoral earnings" of Keeler and Rice-Davies and running a brothel in his home. Keeler has strenuously denied this. She claims Ward used women and sex not for cash, but to gain access to the affluent and influence his rich peers. Keeler also claims Ward was a spy for the Soviet Union and that asked her to do work for him. Tasks included were to get information from Profumo about the placing of nuclear warheads in West Germanydroppingoping off letters at the Soviet Embassy. Keeler claims that once while water-skiing Ward had tried to kill her because he feared she was going to blow the whistle on him. (Ward was prosecuted but committed suicide on the very last day of the trial -- before the jury reached their verdict.) But back to Keeler's story...

In July of 1961, after swimming in the buff in Lord Astor's pool, Keeler met both Profumo and Ivanov. The two vied for Keeler's attention. Keeler howepreferredfered Ivanov, believing he was a real mans man. But one drive around London in the ministerial limousine, and Keeler was smitten by his aura of power. The affair lasted about a month before Profumo called it quits for reasons of propriety.

By November Keeler had a number of lovers. General Ayub Khan, then military dictator of Pakistan, makes the list. But two rivals, West Indian men, Aloysius "Lucky" Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, would lead to the discovery of her affair with Profumo.

Gordon was jealously infatuated with Keeler. He had assaulted Keeler in the street and she alleges he held her hostage for two days with an axe. (Keeler dropped charges for the latter incident due to appeals from Gordon's brother who feared that Gordon would get a long sentence because of his criminal record for violence.)

After rejecting Gordon for the last time, Keeler bought a gun to protect herself from him. She also enlisted Edgecombe to help with her security. This led to Edgecombe and Gordon meting face-to-face in 27 October 1962 at a Soho club. A confrontation ensued, and Edgecombe slit Gordon's face with a knife -- Gordon's wound needed 17 stitches.

Edgecombe quickly went into hiding from the police. Keeler, in fear for her life, changed address so that Gordon could not find her. After a few weeks, Edgecomb realized that he could not remain in hiding indefinitely. He asked Keeler to help him find a lawyer so he could surrender himself to the police. But as Edgecombe had taken another lover, a jealous Keeler refused, telling him that not only would she not help him, but that she planned to testify against him in court.

Obviously outraged by Keeler's decision, Edgecombe showed up outside Ward's flat on December 14, 1962. Keeler was there visiting Rice-Davies; she refused to let him in. Incensed, Edgecombe used the gun that had once belonged to Keeler to shoot at the flat door resulting in enough noise to startle neighbours. Quickly the area was teaming with police and journalists. Edgecombe managed to get away in a taxi, but was later arrested at his Brentford flat.

It was during the investigation to this incident that the details of Keeler's affair with Profumo were discovered. Keeler tried to escape to Spain, and a ridiculous chase ensued as the entourage of reporters pursued her through Europe.

Keeler was found guilty on unrelated perjury charges for not attending as a witness in the trial regarding Gordon's attack. She was imprisoned for nine months in Holloway Prison.

Keeler changed her name, took a job, and when her past has caught up with her, she's been fired. She had two children, from two different fathers. She is said to be estranged from one son yet close to the other.

Today she lives in a council owned flat in north London with her cat.

When Profumo died (March 10, 2006), Keeler said she had not been in love with him as he was so many years older than her.

More than 40 years later Keeler is still bewildered by what happened. She has made public claims that Ward and herself were used as a "smokescreen" by the establishment who wanted the focus kept on the racier aspects of the story, concealing the serious breach of British security. Yeah, like that would ever happen (wink).

The urban myth that the photograph of Christine Keeler astride an Arne Jacobson chair was taken when she was a model is false in more senses than one... Find out more about Lewis Morley's famous nude portrait of Christine Keeler.

Keeler has written several autobiographies; these along with other books on Keeler and the Profumo Scandal are available at Amazon:

Scandal 63 by Clive Irving, Jeremy Wallington, Ron Hall (1964 version shown, also a 1963 version)

Sex Scandals (1985)

Scandal (1989)

The Naked Spy (1992)

The Truth at Last: My Story (2001)

The Trial of Stephen Ward by Ludovic Kennedy (available as the 1988 reprint of the 1964 paperback)

And at Abe, you can still find Nothing But... by Christine Keeler with Sandy Fawkes (1983).

In 1989 Scandal the movie was made, starring John Hurt, Joanne Whalley, Bridget Fonda, and Ian McKellen.

Wicked Baby by Tara Hanks (2005) is a novella based on Christine Keeler & John Profumo.

If you don't like the prices at Amazon, use the Abe search box on the sidebar; or try ebay for Christine Keeler items.

Mike Hammer creator Mickey Spillane dies

By BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press Writer
07/17/2006

Mickey Spillane, the macho mystery writer who wowed millions of readers with the shoot-'em-up sex and violence of gumshoe Mike Hammer, died Monday. He was 88.

Spillane's death was confirmed by Brad Stephens of Goldfinch Funeral Home in his hometown of Murrells Inlet. Details about his death were not immediately available.

After starting out in comic books Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel, "I, the Jury," in 1946. Twelve more followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles included "The Killing Man," "The Girl Hunters" and "One Lonely Night."

Many of these books were made into movies, including the classic film noir "Kiss Me, Deadly" and "The Girl Hunters," in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on television in the series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" and in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a string of Miller Lite beer commercials.

Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other books, including some award-winning volumes for young people.

Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, many of his novels were out of print or hard to find. In 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.

As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from "The Big Kill," Hammer slugs out a little punk with "pig eyes."

"I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone," Spillane wrote. "I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling."

Mainstream critics had little use for Spillane, but he got his due in the mystery world, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Private Eye Writers of America.

Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn't care about reviews. He considered himself a "writer" as opposed to an "author," defining a writer as someone whose books sell.

"This is an income-generating job," he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood."

Spillane was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth, N.J., and attended Fort Hayes State College in Kansas where he was a standout swimmer before beginning his career writing for magazines.

He had always liked police stories — an uncle was a cop — and in his pre-Hammer days he created a comic book detective named Mike Danger. At the time, the early 1940s, he was scribing for Batman, SubMariner and other comics.

"I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the prototype cop," Spillane said.

Danger never saw print. World War II broke out and Spillane enlisted. When he came home, he needed $1,000 to buy some land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three weeks, he had completed "I, the Jury" and sent it to Dutton. The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for it; a literary franchise began. His books helped reveal the power of the paperback market and became so popular they were parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical "The Band Wagon."

He was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional believer in good and evil. He was also a rare political conservative in the book world. Communists were villains in his work and liberals took some hits as well. He was not above using crude racial and sexual stereotypes.

Viewed by some as a precursor to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Spillane's Hammer was a loner contemptuous of the "tedious process" of the jury system, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own murderous terms. His novels were attacked for their violence and vigilantism - one critic said "I, the Jury" belonged in "Gestapo training school" - but some defended them as the most shameless kind of pleasure.

"Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you've finished the first drumstick," Sally Eckhoff wrote in the liberal weekly The Village Voice.

The Hammer novels had a couple of recurring characters: Pat, the honest, but slow-moving cop, and Velda, Mike's faithful secretary. Like so many women in Hammer's life, Velda was a looker, and burning for love.

"Velda was watching me with the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth," Spillane wrote in "Vengeance is Mine!", an early Hammer novel.

"There wasn't any kitten-softness about her now. She was big and she was lovely, with the kind of curves that made you want to turn around and have another look. The lush fullness of her lips had tightened into the faintest kind of snarl and her eyes were the carnivorous eyes you could expect to see in the jungle watching you from behind a clump of bushes."

While the Hammer books were set in New York, Spillane was a longtime resident of Murrells Inlet, a coastal community near Myrtle Beach.

He moved to South Carolina in 1954 when the area, now jammed with motels and tourist attractions, was still predominantly tobacco and corn fields.

Spillane said he fell in love with the long stretches of deserted beaches when he first saw the area from an airplane.

The writer, who became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 and helped build the group's Kingdom Hall in Murrells Inlet, spent his time boating and fishing when he wasn't writing. In the 1950s, he also worked as a circus performer, allowing himself to be shot out of a cannon and appearing in the circus film "Ring of Fear."

The home where he lived for 35 years was destroyed by the 135 mph winds of Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

Married three times, Spillane was the father of four children.
--
National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

When Sex Was Dirty

A review of When Sex Was Dirty -- a collection of stories about the dirty world of New York City in the late 70's and early 80's.