The problem with erotica

Erotic Pompeii wall painting

I once owned a book of erotica. I was browsing a bookstore and bought it on impulse, anticipating robust stories of love and lust, impossibly endowed, abandoned couples in Kama Sutric configurations pleasuring each other in unlikely locations, enjoying ecstatic but improbable sensual marathons. I never finished the book because my stomach just wasn't strong enough to handle it, not even for the sake of research into the genre.

I'm not a prude. I'm a normal, healthy heterosexual female who could never understand the 'not in the mood' phenomenon. Hey, sex is good stuff! I assumed that my first brush with true erotica had been ruined by a particularly nasty example of the genre. Since I had a young child in the house back then, I burned the book. Yes, burned, as in took it outside, tore it apart and set it afire, then breathed a sigh of relief as I hosed away the ashes. Was I glad to see the back of that one - and how I wished I could erase some of those images from my internal memory drive! Unfortunately, that kind of stuff tends to stick harder the more you try to wish it away.

Since then I've read erotic romance novels and quite enjoyed them so, buoyed by these positive forays, I ordered Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin a few weeks ago, fully aware that it was erotica, but with a difference, to my mind: her work is described as literary erotica. I've read a bit of Nin's bio, I'm fond of some of her quotations, and I anticipated a treat.

Now, I know that judging a collection on the basis of a partial reading is not exactly fair to the writer, but the four or five stories I've read thus far, including the very first, have served up an appetizing smorgasbord of incest, rape, genital mutilation, drug addiction, necro.philia, best.iality and pedo.philia - just to name a few. What else is in there, I wonder. Dismemberment? Human sacrifice? The stories also have a tendency to be plotless, consisting of the mindless wanderings of some character from one tasteless and depraved activity to another. I'm not a fan of no-plot, and the activities do not, for me, constitute a great romp.

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe it's too exalted a point for my limited faculties to appreciate, but this is not fun for me, it's not exciting, it's not entertaining and quite frankly, it makes me sick to the stomach.

I won't be visiting that particular buffet again, and I don't understand how we can be collectively horrified when this kind of thing turns up in the news in real life, yet endorse and enjoy it in literature. I can't seem to distinguish between this 'literary erotica' and some of the depraved porn out there. What am I missing?

[In case anyone can't figure out the gratuitous dots in some words, they're to (hopefully) keep sickos googling these topics on the net away from my site.]

Galleys & genre-juggling

I sort of imagined that I'd have very little to do when the galley for Café au Lait arrived. Ha. There's a reason that manuscripts make so many passes before so many eyes, I'm finding. I found a glaring error on the very first page. No, it wasn't one of mine that I'd overlooked (please!) but one that was created because of changes and additions and deletions made after I'd passed the manuscript along. I made special mention of this correction in the cover letter to the production supervisor. Can't have an error on the first page, people! That would put me off a book instantly!

There were other errors of this type here and there. You know what happens when you modify a sentence: you have to re-read the whole sentence to make sure the whole thing hangs together, as well as keep an eye out for inconsistencies further along that result from these changes. Then there were the usual nuts-and-bolts corrections: typos, punctuation, capitalization and such. I was told that while I was reading, the novel had also been passed to a professional proofreader - so here's hoping that between us we've caught everything.

On another note, a Google Alert informed me that Café is on a chick lit list of releases. I did a double take, then remembered that Kevin had remarked on first seeing the cover that he would have guessed 'chick lit' rather than 'romance'. I decided to do some research and discovered that the genres do overlap, seemingly. Here's the Wiki def:

Chick lit" is a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties... Chick lit features hip, stylish female protagonists, usually in their twenties and thirties, in urban settings (usually London or Manhattan), and follows their love lives and struggles for professional success (often in the publishing, advertising, public relations or fashion industry). The books usually feature an airy, irreverent tone and frank sexual themes.

And from Electronic Book Review:

"Chick-Lit is hip, stylish, confident, and sharp - it's also honest and very brave. It battles and conquers the term Chick; it explores, explains, sometimes gives in to and sometimes blows away the notion of a chicklet, trapped by birth to imprint its parents; it is sexual and sensual in dear or savage or shocking ways. And it proves itself structurally, lyrically, and formally as lit-erature."

The latter article also explores the 'postfeminist' label sometimes applied to chick lit. And there was more. If my heroine had been older, the book might picked up the 'hen lit' label. If she'd been a mother, 'mom lit'. Younger, and the 'teen lit' label might have been applied. And so on, and on...

It's all about marketing, I guess. So, do I have strong feelings about the book being thus labeled? Nah. Call it what you like, I say. I've done my part; now it's their turn. With the galley out of the way, all my focus is on the next one.