sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2012-01-30 05:21 pm

She invited them for coffee with some TNT

I was supposed to see Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, but I suspect I am going to be curled up with chicken soup. This is how most of the last couple of days have gone.

Yesterday was the memorial brunch for my grandfather at the Colonial Inn in Concord, where he and my grandmother liked to meet us when they were in town. After my grandfather's cataract surgery, my brother remembers, when he was wearing an eyepatch, they came in once with a tricorne hat and a fife between them, evidently having settled for being wounded soldiers of the Revolutionary War. I hadn't remembered that at all. My mother had some photographs of them I'd never seen: right after they met in 1943, in Mississippi with my three-year-old mother and seven-month-old Jeff. They would have looked like models of a young academic couple if they weren't squinting into the light, with children spilling out of their arms. I may try to scan and post some, but I can promise nothing.

Have a terrific article from The Paris Review about librarian porn. Featuring librarians, I'm afraid, not necessarily written for them. That would be a lot more about rare books and silence. Nevertheless:

Almost immediately, I hit a snag. It is close to impossible to browse a serious library's collection of porn and porn criticism without getting sucked into big, sexy historical theories. Within an hour of my visit to Harvard's Widener Library, I was beginning to suspect that smut had been behind the rise of . . . everything. I discovered that pornos caused the French Revolution, and that the Renaissance really got going when images of hard-core, swan-on-guy action began to circulate among the people. Every pornographer of note, it seemed, was a pop philosopher; every philosopher, a closet pornographer. As for the rise of the novel, of literary realism, this, I learned, was linked to a certain eighteenth-century depiction of a ponytailed dude taking it from behind from another ponytailed dude while the first dude gets sucked off by a chick, who is also taking it from behind from yet a third ponytailed dude, all while another chick—who happens to be wearing a lovely Dormeuse-style cap—rides piggyback on the first dude, which positions her perfectly to flog the third dude, while being orally pleasured from behind by the second dude. The caption to this illustration reads, "A Typical Scene." According to the pile of books I'd stacked onto my library desk, our story is nothing but the evolutionary history of the Porno sapiens.

Somebody send me some hot swan-on-guy. This would be where I curl up.

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 10:34 pm (UTC)(link)
A "typical" scene? Man. Other people get out a lot more than I do.;)

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 10:44 pm (UTC)(link)
That image would be a great candidate for a caption contest.
gwynnega: (Library Smut WG Trekker)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2012-01-30 10:49 pm (UTC)(link)
That link seems as good an excuse as any to dust off this icon from my Buffy days.
selidor: (Default)

[personal profile] selidor 2012-01-30 11:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Oddly enough, I rewatched Bill and Ted on Saturday. It was equally as excellent as I remembered, and helpfully I'd last seen it long enough ago to have forgotten all the plot. We were discussing afterward if there has been a good high-school buddy movie made since, and none came to anyone's mind. The sheer lack of meanness and abundance of bubblegum cheerfulness is also hard to find in subsequent movies.

[identity profile] marlowe1.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 11:18 pm (UTC)(link)
When I was working at the library at the U of MN campus, I saw a couple in a small dusty desk set up on the 8th floor. They left quickly and when I got to the location (I was trying to be discrete), they had left her underwear and a new date and name pairing on the "Sex in the Stacks is awesome" graffitti.

Sadly, that was the only time that I ever saw anything remotely like that in the library. Most of the stories were about the creepy tattooed guy that came every day and tried to make conversation.

I was later fired after turning on a light with a switch that was taped up. It blew up and the library had to be evacuated in order to avoid mercury poisoning.

[identity profile] marlowe1.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 11:20 pm (UTC)(link)
It was strange when Keanu Reeves got so much work after that movie since he's Ted in almost every role and it just seems strange seeing Ted in an action movie or a Shakespeare movie.

On the other hand, 90% of Hollywood actors are the same in every movie.

But still - "Dude. You totally turned my wife into a vampire. Bogus." - can't resist.

[identity profile] rose-lemberg.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 11:21 pm (UTC)(link)
*gulp* I have nothing witty to say at the moment, but this provided an excellent distraction from the pleasures of PVA glue (making a book, how else).

(Swan! On guy! This must be in a poem. )

[identity profile] rose-lemberg.livejournal.com 2012-01-30 11:44 pm (UTC)(link)
But if someone else will write it, they can send it to meeeee :-)
selidor: (Default)

[personal profile] selidor 2012-01-30 11:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh grief. Swanmays, those brothers whose white feathers are flannel-flowers on the hillsides & got their black feathers from the crows, the sisters in the sky who are stars...

(Poem! Poem!)

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:02 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not sure *anything* could beat the original caption.

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
"These liasons are most dangerous, Dude."

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:08 am (UTC)(link)
when he was wearing an eyepatch, they came in once with a tricorne hat and a fife between them, evidently having settled for being wounded soldiers of the Revolutionary War.

Now I'm picturing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup....

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:15 am (UTC)(link)
For some reason I was thinking of "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life..."

[identity profile] schreibergasse.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:20 am (UTC)(link)
Swan on GUY? I think the author may be deliberately mucking with the truth, since while the Renaissance contains lots of hot swan-on-girl and eagle-on-guy action, I don't know of any swan/guy.
The sex scene: good god, a sexual act that doesn't yet have a name!

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 12:57 am (UTC)(link)
Hm. I suppose the all-purpose caption "Christ, what an asshole" could take on a different meaning here....

[identity profile] snowy-owlet.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 01:26 am (UTC)(link)
In my academic library days (not so in the public library), it was widely thought that we should avoid working in the stacks around exams unless we wanted an eyeful. I go several eyes full, but only once was it made clear to me that I was welcome to join in. Alas, Young V, why were you such a prude?

[identity profile] movingfinger.livejournal.com 2012-01-31 01:26 am (UTC)(link)
Sounds like one that would be well-known to actual scholars of erotica/porn/popular literature, doesn't it? I mean, unless... unless there are so many images like that one that the actual scholars would be saying, "Which one? Did you mean the one with the duck, or the one with the weird hat, or the one where they all look like Walpole?"

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