Me in my cozy little library. Click on the pic for a higher resolution shot
Whenever I go to the public library, I wonder where it is that librarians get their notorious reputation. If you ask the typical guy, he’ll tell you it’s the whole “removing the spectacles and undoing the tight hair bun” fantasy. Somewhere underneath there is a wild child waiting to unleash. It sounds like something you would read in Maxim, FHM, or at the very least, Penthouse Forum.
No, I’ve always thought it was something more insidious. In order to appraise the full arsenal of all the weapons hiding behind the staid book covers – all within invocation with a few taps from her electronic card catalogue – surrounding the written word’s gatekeeper, all you need to look up is de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, Bret Easton Ellis, Shannon McKenna, crime fiction, Spillane, not to mention bodice rippers and nonconsensual romance novels, – because hey, if the assailant looks as hot as the guy on the front cover…it must be ok, right? Whatever!
Here’s my all time favorite evidence of just what librarians are really hiding behind that boring facade. Witness, Henry Miller’s classic Tropic of Capricorn. One paragraph here is worth its weight in a dozen truckload of adult magazines.
Valeska was generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curley made her do. He took pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You’d almost swear she didn’t own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for her highfalutin’ ways. He went at it coldbloodedly. “Fish it out!” he’d say, opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!” (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he’d do it dog fashion, and. while she groaned and squirmed he’d nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. “That, Miss Abercrombie,” he said, “is a sort of Doppelganger to my regular cock,” and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that’s how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there’s no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst.
I know the queen of the printed matter has her hand in deciding which title enters her castle. Oftentimes, I can’t help but picture her pronouncements on the donated books for the day: “The Mormon Bloggernacle’s Guide to Sick Skateboard Tricks, Lara Flynn Boyle’s Homecook Recipes Vol. 2, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers audiobook read by Sean Hannity all goes back on the For Sale table. Let’s keep at least three copies of Tropic of Capricorn around.”
And you know, she knows, what’s inside.
What a beautiful — and in light of your post, erotic — photograph, but frustrating cuz I can’t read the titles of your books. Intentional no doubt, but it makes for a frustrated voyeur. :=) Now, perhaps you can show me to the archives where we will faithfully don our white cotton gloves to examine and fondle the rare treasures hidden there?
Btw, you know the text in the right column of your blog is fubar, right? Everything but the tags is too minuscule to be legible. Been that way for quite some time.
I have been working on the fonts. Thanks for the headsup. I think you are probably using Internet Explorer no? It helps to let me know in any event. Give it another go and see how it looks.
There’s nothing interesting on my shelf. There’s this book, that I had to personally scoot over to Istanbul to pick up: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781135996109 And the collection that started it all: http://www.antiqbook.com/books/bookinfo.phtml?nr=1175378663&l=en&searchform= My stash of hardcore Christian / Mormon marriage advice books is way off to the side. That’s the first thing I’d grab if there’s a roaring fire.
Site’s still fubar, I’m afraid. I’m using Firefox 3.5.6 on a Windows ‘chine. When your problem first surfaced a coupla weeks ago, all post text was miniaturized (can’t remember about navigation). You fixed the text in the posts, but navigation text remains lilliputian. Makes me think your problem has to do with style sheets.
Well George Shaw is definitely a bedrock place to start a liberry alright. I’ll see your collected works with a 10-volume set of Harper’s Library Edition of Mark Twain and raise you with a signed copy of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
I’ll have to fold, however, if you persist in raising the table stakes with 10,000 mile round-trip single volume book buying junkets. ‘Course, you might could pick up a burka and a fistful of marital manifestos while you’re there. 
Forgot to add that as someone raised suthren Baptist with a vengeance and a victim of two marriages, I can probably quote you back a few passages from those hardcore books of yours.
But something tells me your collection drifts to the I Married Joan era? 
In which case, here’s a bit of respite — http://www.relevantchurch.com/30dayblog.html.
30 days of spiritual, emotional, sexual, and physical intimacy? Who wants that?
All he needs to do is yell at me to go fetch another cold beer and for me that’s enough sexual intimacy for an entire lifetime.
I think the stuff I read tends to sound like science fiction by today’s standards. That’s precisely why I love it. Here is one I have been ogling: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=1875726890&searchurl=sortby%3D17%26sts%3Dt%26tn%3Dlet%2Bwives%2Bbe%2Bsubmissive%26x%3D0%26y%3D0
Needless to say, my father was raised Catholic, and my mom taught at a convent. When my sister and I were born, we just consolidated into one liberal Protestant family. The beauty of it all was that I am able to romanticize conservative religious cultures. Had I been raised Mormon or SB, I’d probably be doing a 30 Man irrumatio donkey punch bukkake right now.
Normy Mailer is lots of fun. Is the autograph signed towards you personally? An American Dream and Prisoner of Sex are favorites. I laughed out loud when he says the 70s wave of feminist women writers write like “tough faggots.” Can’t believe he was born down at Long Branch NJ.
Sherri, I was tweaking the CSS stylesheets all day yesterday. And I use Firefox 3.5.6 myself. Could it be some setting on your browser. Like View>Zoom>Reset, which is obvious, or the less obvious
Tools > Options > Contents Tab > Fonts and Colors (Advanced) button > Check Allow pages to chose their own fonts.
This seems to be Firefox’s default setting. Not sure why you are having that problem. Let me know THanks!
No, the signed Mailer book is actually a leather-bound Franklin edition given to me one Christmas by my mother-in-law, a rare departure from the usual sweater and rather surprising in its thoughtfulness given that there was no love lost between us … until it dawned on me that she just pulled it from her shelf of never-read Franklin subscription tomes whose sole purpose was to enhance her home decor. Appreciated nonetheless and actually read, it now resides, along with other special (to me) editions, behind glass in my Levenger barrister bookcase.
I’ve been shaking my head over Mailer for decades (I still remember his feature interview in Rolling Stone). Still, I thoroughly enjoyed Tough Guys, and Harlot’s Ghost is as masterful as anything in my library.
If you’ve been out of the Protestant loop for awhile, you may or may not be aware that organized small group gatherings/programs are all the rage now as an adjunct to regular church activities. You and your sweetie should sign up for a couples group — it is high entertainment to observe the contorted maneuverings the wives go through these days in their efforts to simultaneously accommodate and neutralize the whole submissive thing without appearing to actually toss a bronx cheer at Scripture.
Your site seems to be healed, with no remedial action on my part. Recent iterations of the once rock solid Firefox seem to be a bit flaky, but I am satisfied your problem was an errant tag or some glitch in your styles.