When Ruth Dickson released her 1967 book Married Men Make the Best Lovers, it went off like a bombshell. Defenders of the “sanctity” of marriage rose up to dismiss her frank, innovative, thoroughly researched book. But why? Why cling to the broken ritual of marriage? What comfort is there in a crumbling institution held together by meaningless tradition and out of touch patriarchy?

In this thoughtful follow-up, Dickson examines marriage itself. As she explains, “It’s no secret that the divorce rate is reaching astronomical proportions, yet nobody seems to do anything about the sole cause of divorce: marriage.”

Expertly weaving historical research, personal anecdotes, and scalpel-sharp philosophy, Marriage Is a Bad Habit makes the case that a life without marriage is a life of freedom—a woman’s freedom from male dominance and abuse, a man’s freedom from female resentment and martyrdom. In this new world it’s time for the sexes to find a new way of living together. Or, more specifically, a new way to live apart.

Ruth Dickson tells the truth, makes you laugh, gives you innovative ideas and thoughtful advice on how to navigate the tricky waters of true freedom of choice.

No no no, you dimwit, not those loins!

A confession.

Like anybody else launching a writing career, I was not very particular about what I wrote as long as I got paid for it.  That is why I wrote half a dozen sex novels. They were a great way to learn fictional skills, they paid well, the publisher never asked for editorial fixes, and as long as I did not cross certain lines of taste the publisher would accept everything I produced. In those days that line was No Explicit Body Parts, No Clinical Terms for Intercourse, and No Dirty Words. That’s why sex novels in those days were weak tea compared to the hot erotica in even the average romance published today.  I was so good at writing sex scenes that I was occasionally asked by the publisher to “sex up” a drab and unimaginative scene written by another author.

For that reason, I feel confident that it will be no loss for me to pass up the opportunity to attend the Creative Writing in the 21st Century conference  this coming weekend in Toronto, where one of the presentations is entitled “He put his what, where? Or: How to teach students to write plausible sex scenes, prevent them from winning the Bad Sex Fiction Award, while not suffering from fear, alarm, dread, or embarrassment in the process.”.

Quill & Quire interviewed the pair (both female) of creative writing teachers conducting the course, and you will find the Q&A candid and refreshingly funny.

For instance, asked what inspired them to broach the delicate topic of scx scenes in their class, they replied “I think the trigger for us was the contest for the worst sex scene. There are so many writers that I admire who write terrible sex scenes. A lot of them, even if they’re not violent or offensive, are just really boring: he put his thing there, and she stroked this, he moaned, and he said, ‘Oh baby, baby.’”

For the complete interview click on Creative writing Q&A: Nicole Markotic on the delicate art of teaching sex scenes.

And if you don’t remember what contest they’re talking about, read Bad Sex Award Is Coming.  Oh God Oh God Yes Yes Yes It’s Coming!

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Are Your Loins Churning Yet?

Sorry, m'dear. After removing your corset I'm exhausted

Guys who fantasize themselves heroes of steamy Victorian romances had better bone up on the protocol for removing their mistress’s garments.  By the time you strip her to the buff she will have fallen asleep and your stallion lust will have flagged to the consistency of a biscuit dipped in tepid tea. The afternoon quickie, known as a nooning in those days, must in truth have been a painful slowie, unfolding from afternoon to tea time before all was in readiness for a frolic as milord fumbled with milady’s hooks, eyes, buttons and bows.

The truth is, a Victorian lady’s clothes and underwear were more complex than the equation for the Higgs Boson and no easier to solve.  How do we know this?  Romance novelist Deanne Gist acquired a collection of Victorian couture and donned it, then considered what it would take for a lover to remove it with as much alacrity as romance writers impute to the ardent male of the time.  Her conclusion made her rethink her own sex scenes and will certainly make her colleagues re-imagine theirs.

“At the recent Romance Writers of America’s annual convention in New York,” reports Daisy Dumas of the Daily Mail, “period novelists watched Ms Gist squeeze herself, with help, into 12 layers of imitation Victorian garments. Starting in nothing but her ‘unmentionables,’ Ms Gist’s aim was to illustrate just how historically inaccurate many period novels are. Taking an hour to dress, it would have taken the same amount of time to undress – and help in the form of a ladies’ maid would have been absolutely necessary.”

Geist’s experiment in seductive couture can be seen in this video. You’ll readily see that if you imagine being thrown back to the Victorian era for the opportunity to assault milady’s virtues, you’d best bring your Blackberry with you to follow the instructions for disrobing her. The corset alone is harder to pick than a brass padlock.

Romance novelist buys full set of Victorian undergarments to understand what makes a bodice-ripper

Richard Curtis

With The Other Hand Clapping E-Reads adds yet another great work of erotic fiction by Marco Vassi, possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compared his prose to Henry Miller’s.

In The Other Hand Clapping, Larry and Eleanor had been married for four years when Larry first began studying Zen seriously. Now, two years later, Larry stands facing a mirror. He has entered into “the great doubt,” a psychological impasse in his studies that threatens to rip his marriage apart.

Soon, Larry’s mind is overtaken by suspicion of infidelity on the part of Eleanor. Is the evidence real? Is it a hallucination brought about by his meditation? Or is this all some sort of metatheater acted out by a wife feeling her husband slip away? Whatever the case, passion inevitably transforms into suspense, and all-encompassing distrust pushes the couple toward a possibly violent climax.

Although Marco Vassi’s life was cut short, his memory lives on here with the release of The Vassi Collection.

To learn more about this amazing writer, read An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies.

On Valentine’s Day we celebrate romance, but if your predilections are for lustier fare you may want to immerse yourself and your Significant Other in Marco Vassi’s erotic fiction.

Vassi was, without a doubt, the foremost erotic writer of our generation. Praised by Norman Mailer, Kate Millett, Saul Bellow, and Gore Vidal, he was not only the quintessential sexual explorer, but a literary craftsman whose own life experiences became the stuff of his fiction—expanded, of course, by a grand imagination and a full sense of the absurd. Tragically, Vassi died from pneumonia after he had contracted AIDS.

Start your journey with The Gentle Degenerates in which a young man let loose in the human potential movement travels from one end of the country to the other, opening himself to all the possible variations of sexual experience and trying to find love in the midst of explosive and unlimited sensuality. The protagonist of The Gentle Degenerates sounds very much like the Marco Vassi whose extraordinary memoir The Stoned Apocalypse captured the glorious, mind-blasted sixties like no other book of its time.

For a complete list of Vassi’s groundbreaking work visit his author’s page. And if he fascinates you as he has fascinated so many others, read our profile of him, An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies.

Richard Curtis

After Marco Vassi, the brilliant erotic writer and a dear personal friend, lost his struggle with HIV I paid tribute to him in an essay, An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies. And I vowed to reissue his books  when I launched our E-Reads program. We have fulfilled that promise with release of ten of his works.  The latest is The Erotic Comedies .

The Erotic Comedies is a collection of fables and memoirs by America’s foremost erotic writer does for our era what Boccaccio, Swift, and Balzac did for theirs – exposes the human animal in all its absurdity. Vassi takes erotic writing to its extremes and then further, unraveling the seams of our most secret fantasies. His subjects are radical lesbians, male supremacists, transsexuals, establishment normals, therapists, revolutionaries, gynecologists, gurus and even God – created in Vassi’s own image, of course – all of whom are reduced to the ridiculous in a shower of bawdy laughter.

Capturing the sizzling vitality of the erotic upheaval of his age while also grasping its peculiar pretensions, he creates a gallery of unforgettable characters who are only ourselves become somehow larger than life. As with other great humorists, Vassi has a serious purpose: to explode the prevailing myths so the reader is forced to respond to his or her eroticism with unprogrammed intelligence. When everything from monogamy to coprophilia is presented from the perspective of the cosmic horse-laugh, no one can avoid finding his or her own role in the human comedy.

Richard Curtis

An agent friend of mine wrote to me as follows:

“Her eyes were crystal blue and she looked at me across the table with withering candor.  ‘I just don’t think she would climax that fast,’  she said.  ‘She’s the kind of woman who needs to take it up slowly.’ Her gaze never unlocked from mine as she spoke to me.

“Had I been the brooding hero of a novel I’d have responded with a seductive rejoinder.  But I’m not the hero of a novel.  I’m a literary agent. The stunning woman opposite me was an editor, and we were discussing a sex scene in a romance novel by an author I represented. Whatever repartee I might have thought of, there was only one appropriate – if wimpy – response:  ‘I’ll discuss it with my client.’”

Exchanges like that one take place every day in the book industry, and Russell Smith, writing in the Globe and Mail about a prominent publishing executive recently caught up in a sexual harassment scandal, reminds us that the publishing business is saturated in sexuality.

“It’s an unusual industry,” Smith writes, “one dominated by highly educated and intelligent women, many of them young. Most of the high-up executives on the commercial side of publishing are still men. The literary side is female. Most of the editors-in-chief of the major publishing houses are women; most of the publicists are women; almost all the agents are women; the powerful CBC Radio programs that discuss books are hosted by women; most of the readers are women; the single powerful bookstore chain in the country is run by a woman. And it is a highly social industry, because social events promote books: Anyone who works for a publishing house must attend, as part of work, frequent evening book launches, book fairs and literary festivals, and they are all soaked in booze. So are most of the writers.

“Furthermore, if you’re involved with fiction, or even with memoir and biography, you’re discussing sex and romance the whole time – because most novels still have relationships at their core. So you spend a lot of genuine professional work time, as a straight male talking to straight females, answering questions like, ‘Why would she let him take her top off right then?’ It becomes difficult to define exactly what flirting is in this environment.”

So – why aren’t there more sex scandals in publishing?  A key reason is professionalism.  Fatal Attraction notwithstanding, lust and lechery do not mix with representing or publishing authors.  “I need these people working at their best and most relaxed,” says Smith. “They make me look good. If I made any of my colleagues nervous about talking to me or seeing me then I would only be damaging myself. They wouldn’t want to help me. So you could say it’s a selfish self-control. Hell, even a consensual relationship would be idiotic: I need my colleagues to be objective and unemotional. And I need my career more than I need the ego-boost of impressing a lady. Perhaps I’m getting old, but believe it or not, I actually value my colleagues’ professional abilities more than their beauty.”

Publishing people are commendably restrained when it comes to surrendering to sexual temptation with their professional colleagues.  Most of us are content to enjoy hot sex vicariously through the vehicle of a well crafted (what I call a Three Cold Shower) fictional sex scene.  And some people I know have confided that seeing a book they’re involved in hit the bestseller list is better than sex.

Call it weird. Call it perverse.  Call it publishing.

Read The truth about publishing: It’s full of hotties

Richard Curtis

Eight classic works by Marco Vassi, considered by discerning readers to be the finest erotic novelist of our time since Henry Miller, are now available in paperback as well as e-book editions published by E-Reads.

I wrote the following to introduce our e-book editions:

******************************************************************

An Intrepid Voyager to A World of Searing Erotic Fantasies

Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen?

To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, The Stoned Apocalypse, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become The Stoned Apocalypse, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as “sex novels”, a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt – quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along – in this case pneumonia – conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in E-Reads editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

– Richard Curtis

Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen?

To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, The Stoned Apocalypse, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become The Stoned Apocalypse, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as “sex novels”, a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt – quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along – in this case pneumonia – conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in E-Reads editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

– Richard Curtis

Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen? To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, The Stoned Apocalypse, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become The Stoned Apocalypse, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as “sex novels”, a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt – quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along – in this case pneumonia – conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in E-Reads editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

– Richard Curtis