the first sex scene in scottish literature

the following steamy scene was written by ragbag role model, thomas urquhart way back in sixteen fitty two. like all things urquhart, it combines latin and greek neologisms, absurd euphemisms, wildly elaborate sentences, obscure allusions, and circumlocutious syntax. it also happens to be decidedly unerotic.

Thus for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here it was that passion was active, and action passive, they both being overcome by other, and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme, or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness, and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife, and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced act be lawful, that the diction which suppones it, can be of no greater transgression, unless you would call it a solaecisme, or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender.

if you had trouble getting turned on by this, much less understanding it, join the crowd—it was as hard to follow way back in sixteen fitty two as it is today. fortunately, i have found an online translation for you.

singular pleasures

the final pearl in our pearl necklace of erotica comes from harry matthews’ singular pleasures. mr. matthews has the distinction of being the only american member of the randy group of french oulipo writers. members of this group used wacky constraints (e.g. never using the letter e, starting each sentence with a successive letter of the alphabet, et cetry etcetry) in order to get their literary juices flowing. mr. matthews, like fellow member italo calvino, used constraints but never really elaborated on what they were.

singular pleasures is a collection of vignettes all involving masturbation in one form or another. it is the invisible cities of fapping. here are some good ones:

Masturbating as he lies on a floormat, his head propped on one hand, his eyes on a lighted television set, somewhere in Kyoto, there is a young man of twenty. The screen in front of him shows a young man lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set on which a young man is lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set on which a young man is lying on his side and masturbating while watching a television set whose image is too small to decipher.

Somewhere north of the Bering Straits, sitting on the edge of an ice floe, his face impassive, all movement concealed beneath thicknesses of pelt and fur, an Eskimo male of thirty-one is bringing himself to an orgasm of devastating intensity in a slickness of dissolving blubber.

A man of thirty-five is about to experience orgasm in one of the better condominiums in Gaza. He is masturbating, but neither hand nor object touches his taut penis: arranged in a circle, five hairblowers direct their streams of warm air toward that focal point. He has plugged his ears with wax balls.

(roth’s baseball glove, twain’s field, and now matthew’s seal blubber: if you haven’t already guessed—the secret theme of this year’s sexlit day is onanism)

see this list for more.

do you know what mark twain was doing in the summer of 1876?

answer 1: he was researching material for what would later become the prince and the pauper. TRUE.

answer 2: he was writing his great, great-american-novel the adventures of huckleberry finn. ALSO TRUE.

answer 3: he was penning bawdy elizabethan fanfiction that included the characters: queen elizabeth, william shakespeare, ben johnson, walter raleigh, and—my main squeeze—françois rabelais. MEGA TRUE!!!

1601 is its title. twain considered it so risque that it took him 26 years to finally acknowledge that he wrote it. said twain, “if there is a decent word findable in it, it’s because i overlooked it.” you can get it for free here.

Then fell they to talk about ye manners and customs of many peoples, and Master Shaxpur spake of ye boke of ye sieur Michael de Montaine, wherein was mention of ye custom of widows of Perigord to wear uppon ye headdress, in sign of widowhood, a jewel in ye similitude of a man’s member wilted and limber, whereat ye queene did laugh and say widows in England doe wear prickes too, but betwixt the thighs, and not wilted neither, till coition hath done that office for them. Master Shaxpur did likewise observe how yt ye sieur de Montaine hath also spoken of a certain emperor of such mighty prowess that he did take ten maidenheddes in ye compass of a single night, ye while his empress did entertain two and twenty lusty knights between her sheetes, yet was not satisfied; whereat ye merrie Countess Granby saith a ram is yet ye emperor’s superior, sith he wil tup above a hundred yewes ‘twixt sun and sun; and after, if he can have none more to shag, will masturbate until he hath enrich’d whole acres with his seed.

Then spake ye damned windmill, Sr Walter, of a people in ye uttermost parts of America, yt capulate not until they be five and thirty yeres of age, ye women being eight and twenty, and do it then but once in seven yeres.

sexlit day is here at last

i have been rolling on zoloft since the conclusion of word idol, but today’s (slightly-rescheduled) second annual observance of sexlit day has been the light at the end of my freudian tunnel.

what is sexlit day? sexlit day is a way of posting the greasiest, oiliest, most prurient passages from our all-too-typically dry canon; think of it as mr. skin but for literature. these excerpts shall remain largely without commentary—because of the mélange of complex emotions that they my rouse in you, the last thing that you want to be thinking of is me over your shoulder with a wide impish grin.

a word of warning: while the ragbag is usually an all-ages show for puritans and neo-conservatives, sexlit day is that rare pagan bacchanalia where anything goes. thus: enable the v-chips on your computers if reading naughty words from literary virtuosos is not your thang.

the first excerpt is from phillip roth’s mastur(bation)piece, portnoy’s complaint (1969). grab yourself a catcher’s mitt and enjoy:

What if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if…In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside out window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock as I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with “poor”) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark.

#sexlit

an unexplained absence

salve citizens,

i have been away from the thing called the internet for the better part of ten days. this mysterious disappearance was due to a spirit journey that i pretended to undertake in the white mountains of new hampshire. while i cannot reveal the 14 new enlightenments about my psyche that i feigned to achieve, i can tell you that the tutelary deity that assisted me took the form of an overly musky, bucktoothed marmot by the name of mistress dragonsong.

because of my unexpectedly long absence, i failed to oversee two critical ragbag items and thus offer the following programming announcement:

• the third installment in the gripping audio books out of context series failed to automatically post itself due to a software glitch similar to the y2k “willennium” bug. because of the many 1s and 0s involved, it is unknown at what point in the future or in the past that this installment will ever post itself. you will be delighted to learn that the fourth installment has not been affected and is due to appear on the 14th of december at 10:10 am.
• one year ago on december 4th, my gastroenterologist and i posted a bunch of titillatingly raunchy quotes under the cloak of highbrow literature. we decided that if we were both around a year from then, we would continue the tradition. technically, i wasn’t still around when december 4th came this year—i was gumming up peyote buttons in an underground labyrinth assisting mistress dragonsong with her tick problem. because of this loophole in the fabric of time, i am happy to announce that the second annual sex & literature day will be officially observed on thursday, december 17th, 2009.

i thank you for your patience and hope to reward it tomorrow with a special week-long feature that has been giving me the metaphorical excitement of 34 viagra pills.

the miller’s tail (pun intended)

my favourite chaucer sex quote, nay my favourite chaucer quote, nay may favourite quote of all time goes like this:

“And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.”

now THAT is really freaking dirty.

ACHTUNG: strong language alert!

the following excerpt is from a dirty love letter that james joyce wrote his wife ALMOST EXACTLY 99 years ago (dec 8, 1909).

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night.

yeccch! get a webcam, you filthy buggers! more here.

sex and literature

from parasols:

one that always makes me laugh is from The Time-Traveler’s Wife:

“I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent.”

nominee for bad sex scene of the year

from the gaurdian:

Sebastian’s erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it.

via