Hapax on Shepherd
On Shepherd.com I posted a listicle, Best Books of Erotic Fiction that will Make You Laugh. See also: my Lists of Lists: Annotated Lists of Sexy/Erotic Books.
I really enjoy BookDNA, and the author lists are always fun to browse through. Authors sign up as a Founding Member ($50) and that allows them to post their own listicle. The guidelines for what to post are somewhat complicated, but the people running the site are helpful and enthusiastic. I worried that the X-rated nature of these books might be an issue, but I wrote the listicle in a very literary way, so it wasn’t a problem.
The main problem I had making this list was choosing the title to fit the category. I had several books which I thought would be great for this list and several titles which I thought would qualify but hadn’t actually read from cover to cover.
For example, because of my love for Milan Kundera’s fiction, it seemed guaranteed that I would include one title, probably Book of Laughter and Forgetting (or alternatively Unbearable Lightness of Being). But when I reread BOLAF a month ago, I realized that it was a LOT different than what I remembered when I read it in the 1980s. I knew that both books had funny parts and sexy parts, but I found that it was less comedy than an ironic sense of the absurd. Kundera has a philosophical essayistic style which is easy and fun to read, but it really didn’t make me laugh–not anymore at least. So I had to ditch it.
I knew that Marco Vassi had to be on the list, but which title. I wavered between In Touch and Erotic Comedies. EC (also known as “Carcass of Dreams”) is brilliant and profound and comic–plus the title says it all. At the same time, the subject matter deals with extreme taboos and perversions. I’m open-minded about sex obviously, but even I found that Vassi’s erotic fantasies explored things way beyond most people’s tolerance (I wrote about this story cycle here). I wish more people would read this story collection, but within the context of a listicle, it would be impossible to put this story collection in its proper context. On the other hand, In Touch (which I wrote about at length) has a more conventional story, and even though it purports to be a serious story, it has a lot of funny moments (and the dialogue is very witty).
(I also wrote a short reader’s guide to the fiction of Marco Vassi).
In college I remember Portnoy’s Complaint as being the funniest book I had ever read. Sure, I remember that the first part was a long rant by the Jewish main character, but the sex/blowjob scene (which Roth described in excruciating detail) made me laugh a lot. So I was looking forward to rereading it. But when I picked it up a month ago, I was surprised to find that the part about being Jewish and agonizing about one’s parents was really long. The sex really didn’t occupy as big a part of the story as I had remembered. I’m not saying that the first part was boring, but I was surprised that my 22 year old self would have read that far to get to the sexy stuff.
I knew that I would put Terry Southern’s Candy on the list, but I really worried that the novel would not date well. Personally I never thought Southern was writing for female readers; he seemed to be writing primarily for male nerds like me. I wasn’t bothered that the story and the humor was so sexist, but it still made me laugh more than the other books on the list. Books like this involve a “suspension of morality” on the reader’s part; that is what made Voltaire’s Candide both grim and entertaining. I do wonder what today’s female readers must think of satirical books like this which deal with sexual stereotypes so shamelessly.
True Porn Clerk Stories is really one of the funniest things I have ever heard and read. I had to include it despite the fact that it probably wasn’t fiction but based on the author’s personal experiences. I admit that I have visited a few porn video stores in the 1990s; going there always made me nervous and embarrassed. I must admit that walking through the aisles was always surreal and exciting. I probably encountered one or two female clerks, and out of pure embarrassment, I probably said no more than 10 words to them total.
It makes me happy to help people read Rachel Timm’s Whatever You Want maze story. It is a fiendishly clever book and one I wish I had read. I have bought some other maze stories in the erotica genre — and in fact I’ve played with the idea of writing my own, but this is the first one I read (and probably the best). Space limitations prevented me from mentioning it in the listicle, but I’m sure that Choice of Games interactive fiction platform has sexually-explicit maze stories (see here and here).
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The Jeopardy game show has several sexual-oriented gaffes here and (of course) here.
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The Guardian has a long-lasting sexually explicit series called This is How We Do it. I see 25+ entries. Will read and report back.
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To my surprise and delight, Wikipedia has a good overview about depictions of sexuality in science fiction. The SF Encyclopedia also has a good overview — up to the 1980s.
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I just realized that I didn’t post my Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Marco Vassi in the blog section. I prepared this after writing my long study of Marco Vassi’s fiction (which appeared in Existential Smut 1 and on this website).
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After publishing my two story collections, I vowed to step back and just curate future volumes without writing more stories in that genre. And I meant that. But I am still tempted to reflect on elements on my previous stories and perhaps use them as springboards for further fiction or discussions. My stories are frozen in time and reflect the time they are written, but I still feel the resonances of them to this day.
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In response to a subreddit thread asking whether Milan Kundera was a misogynist, I wrote this reply. (It’s sort of scatter-brained, but I made my point):
Kundera expert here. I’ve struggled with that question a lot. But a lot of the sexual dalliances depicted in these stories are a product of the repressive society he found himself in. A lot of the sexual novels dealt with keeping secrets and avoiding the watchful glare of the Communist government. The stereotyping and objectification of women parallels the way the communist state objectified its citizenry. Through metafictional techniques, he liked to poke holes through his characters, so the superficial treatment of characters and their motives was usually ironic.
I think Kundera has a lot of interesting things to say about relationships and sexuality and privacy and about the romantic impulse. He seemed to be anti-romantic. I confess that I am a little behind reading his latest novels though.
I think some of his female characters come alive and are sympathetic. When I was going to college in the 1980s, a lot of females really enjoyed his stories (almost more than male readers) But also Kundera represented the European approach to life and love, and maybe that accounted for his appeal. Also, his approach to art and life and poetry was fairly distinct and appealing. His novels were funny and lyrical. For his pre-1990 novels, people liked to read his stories because they mixed ideas with stories, the erotic with the philosophical in a very easy to read way.
The sexual issues that interest readers today are a lot different from those that interested a Czech man in a Communist country. For example, Kundera didn’t have a sense of alternate forms of sexuality or of BDSM or of how gender can be expressed. He really had no sense of porn or about the alternate kinds of sexual expressions avialable in an Internet-addled world. But who cares? We read to learn about the struggles that characters experienced in the society the author lived in, not society as it exists today.
Not to dissuade anyone from reading Kundera’s fiction, but I found Kundera’s essay collection: The Curtain to be remarkable and insightful. As a fiction writer, I admire the polyphonic way Kundera organized his chapters. It changed my world!
To add something more: Kundera was actually recommended to me by a female friend at college, and I recommended it to everybody on campus. (Indeed, I reference a Kundera quotation in my ES 1 story, “Miniature Golf”) Perhaps my young adult prurient curiosity made me inclined to gloss over the male-centered point-of-view; I mean, hypothetically speaking, wouldn’t it be nice for men to have so many sexual partners during their adult years (never mind that it was under an authoritarian regime). Over the years, I am less attracted to that aspect of Kundera’s fiction than his unrelenting focus on aesthetics and trying to dramatize ideas through his fiction. I haven’t read his last few novels, but I came up with a facile pronouncement about it. Without the threat of a repressive regime to counter the sexual stories, the stories seemed kind of empty and abstract. Of course, I didn’t really believe this pronouncement, but it is much easier to make a story work if you incorporate desire and fucking into it.
I’ve been reading Book of Laughter and Forgetting in preparation for my first book report. I realize that I had forgotten a lot of details — especially the complicated plots (like retrieving love letters) or setting up a rendezvous). More on that later.
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From that reddit thread, one person noticed that Kundera’s essays almost never mention literary works by female authors. I wrote this long response:
Fascinating observation, and I looked over Kundera’s essay collections, and you are correct.. I think this is a case of Kundera being a product of his times (and indeed, me too, because I didn’t even notice this imbalance). Kundera read pretty widely especially in continental fiction; before emigrating to France, I’m sure he had a limited exposure to novels. After emigrating in 1975, Kundera probably had access to all kinds of writers and artists.
It does not seem unusual that a novelist his age would fail to include female authors in his literary pantheon. But given that Kundera wrote primarily about sexuality and personal relationships, it’s a little surprising that he would not have explored the works of woman writers from the 20th century more deeply. Perhaps this imbalance in attention may simply be the result of preferring works of continental fiction from the 18th and 19th century.
Of course, Kundera was not as prolific an essayist as his contemporary John Updike, but Updike wrote about all kinds of authors without seeming to favor those of his own gender. Maybe being an English-language novelist in USA made it easier to read outside your comfort zone.
In the 1980s, I had creative writing workshops with two renowned authors (both male), and yet 80% of the grad students there were female. I would hardly call either author misogynist, but their pronouncements in class would irritate the female students sometimes. At the time I pretty much was familiar with all the authors of Kundera’s literary pantheon, but the rest of the grad students were reading all kinds of different authors — (including a lot of US-born and female authors). The experience definitely turned my literary world upside down. Although Kundera taught world literature in the Prague film school in the 1950s and 1960s, I don’t think he taught at universities at all after emigrating to France. Perhaps if he had, Kundera might have been exposed to more woman writers.
Finally, which authors you read and which authors you write about are totally different things. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much significance into the works that an author never got around to writing about?
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The Sex and Psychology podcast recently had two episodes about the role of fantasy: Episode 438: Should You Share Your Sexual Fantasies? and Episode 439: Fantasy Confessions – Why Even Happy Couples Keep Secrets. Nice discussion, but it’s interesting how some of my stories and essays covered the same ground as the academic researchers. I discussed this issue in depth in my ES 2 essay,
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As much as I enjoy the S&P podcast and S&P blog, I resist the tendency to boil sexual issues to social science analysis. Justin Lehmiller does a good job at humanizing the discussion — and actually all the show’s guests do good jobs as well, but social science is only one lens by which to view human sexuality. Leave aside literary analysis, you also have
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Site news. First, the Lusty Bibliophile Annual Book List will be delayed by about a month. I originally expected it to be ready in October or November, but something big dropped on my lap, and I’ll be working on that until the end of November. But in early December it will definitely be ready for public consumption.
Second, I keep delaying the Lusty Bibliophile column/newsletter. The October/November project has pushed that back once again, but have no fear: I am gathering lots of cool books to write about. I expect that it will be ready in January 2026.
Third, for the heck of it, I published Existential Smut 1 on Archive.org . It’s Creative Commons, so obviously I expected it to reach there eventually, but I was unenthusiastic about it arriving there. I wanted to delay having an online reader for the ebook as long as possible. Two years ago, I uploaded it to one of the dark libraries (I think LibGen) because I knew it would propagate the ebook to multiple places. Since then, I made another version (with several small changes) and planned to upload it in the same fashion. Ultimately, I decided that if I was going to upload it to a public sharing site, I might as well do it directly to archive.org myself. That would allow me to me a fair description and control the versioning of it. (Also, I generally love archive.org!)
To my horror, I discovered that Archive.org’s online reader removed the ebook cover art and disabled all the internal hyperlinks. I mean, why make an online ebook reader if it fails in its most basic functionality? No matter. It’s still fairly readable, and you can still download the EPUB directly. Also, the PDF which Archive.org auto-generated has hyperlinks which work normally — even though I don’t especially love the PDF’s layout. (I could have made a nicer PDF using Calibre).
ES 1 is a special case because Amazon banned it, so I am making more of an effort to distribute it.
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