Word: nin
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...Nin was an indefatigable diarist, a sometime poet, novelist and Spanish dancer, a Boswellian collector of literary friends and a flamboyant promoter of her small but genuine talents. Ironically, her death two years ago at age 73 preceded by only a few months the general fame she had courted so long. The source of this attention was a cache of erotic stories she had written, for cash, in the early 1940s; her patron was an anonymous collector who told her to "leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex" and paid her a dollar a page. Published posthumously...
...Nin...
...Delta of Venus came from and that 13 of them are now being released as Little Birds. Although shorter and weaker than their predecessors, these newly uncovered tales radiate the same musty, hothouse sensuality, and their appeal as literary curiosities seems equally strong. For in tackling explicitly sexual subjects, Nin was poaching on an established male preserve. Pornography in all its guises had al most always been written by men and for men. Not only was Fanny Hill no lady, she was not even a woman; she was the mouthpiece for John Cleland. Moll Flanders, another notable 18th century bawd...
More often, Nin's tone is languid, dreamy; she clutters her stage with fin de siècle props and elegant clothes. Her potential lovers meet in artist's studios or Parisian sidewalk cafés. Traditional pornography gets to the point quickly, setting out the sexual ABCs with no nonsense. Nin, however, lingers over the calligraphy; she works as hard keeping her partners apart as she does bringing them together...
...biggest break with erotic conventions involves the introduction of impotence. This subject, needless to say, is the last thing a man wants to find in his porn. Yet some form of this failure figures in nearly all Nin's tales. A typical situation involves a husband who places his new wife so high on a pedestal that he cannot reach her to make love. Artists paint nude models instead of possessing them. Though these repeated male shortcomings may constitute a kind of sexual revenge, they also lend Nin's stories a plausibility missing in most erotica...