30: The Sword of Pleasure

This is my quick video review of the cover of The Sword of Pleasure by Peter Green.

29: An Invitation To Sin

Usually, for something like this that I want to write about, I wanna hold it, possess it, ruffle it up you know. That much incremental joy improvement did not equal $5.24 in this case. So...is that not the most polite invitation to sin ever? Whatever dark emotionally malnourished part of my mind that creates this sort of thing told me that this is how my grandmother organizes orgies. Oh you nice young man, you just must come to our next key party. Now you have your invitation, please RSVP at your earliest convenience with the number of accompanying bitches you plan to offer to grandpa. Just sick. Or do I not want to disempower myself? I feel maladjusted suddenly.

28: Night of the Quarter Moon

Guess the year time! An accepted San Francisco society couple come under attack when it is suggested/discovered that the woman of the duo is of mixed racial heritage. She's part black they say while physically, yes physically, attacking them and throwing bricks through their window. Later, the woman who is light skinned, strips down (showin the nudey bits in other words) in court to prove that she is white. Also, surely a book about the then sensitivity to the mixing of ethnicities would not utilize a title that heavily suggests a racial slur regarding someone who has mostly but not all white ancestry. Nope. "Quarter Moon" is ever so delightfully just far enough away to give great big heaps of plausible deniability while doing nothing more than whispering "quadroon" over your should, into your ear and touching your mind with its dirty little raycess* fingers. It turns out that the woman actually did have a black grandmother (proud African-American they call her of course as that will make up all the difference) so not only did she dare mix in inappropriate circles, but she lied to them, too!
So, the year? 1917? Uh uh. 1925? Nope? Surely, not after WWII? How about all the way in 1959. Sometimes, though I want to hold firm, I wonder whether it is better to remember the worst of the past or simply wash it away. Oh, inconsequential note, this tied into the movie of the same title starring Drew Barrymore's dad which is his name now.

*Raycess is of course the more phonetically pleasing form of racist.

27: Jungle She

I have to think that the title--this is the 1953 1st edition--is a reference to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who was a pulp and comic star of the time and the time before. Actually, she was the first female star of a comic book, but...since no one today is going to get the allusion you gotta assume the author failed, right? That's his job--to be eternal and have the words last. Instead you reference something forgotten and exist not to be read, but for a possessiveness of the cover. Which is very nice, isn't it?

Trivia--this author also wrote what would be the basis for Elvis' Stay Away Joe feature which put the singer (in his late 60s persona) as a Native American. Naturally, this went just as swimmingly as you could expect and was in no way mocking of Injuns.

26: The Cuddle Sutra

Aww, it's such a sweet book for cute couples in loving and close relationships. Let's see how dirty I can make it!

Step 1. Just give the titles of some sample maneuvers and allow a wink and imagination to do the rest. Yes, these are real "cuddle positions" according to the text. The Layer Cake, oh yeah. The Two Pillows, uh huh. The Tete a Tete, qui qui.

Step 2. The same thing, list some of the positions with a little detail of your own fiction but not something that gives a full image. You still gotta let the nasty out of your imagination. Lile the Pinky Play--gonna need some sanitizer. The Gleap--or as it is sometimes known, the Detroit Haberdasher (because of what you do with your head). The Tug O'love for when there's just not enough time for the full Pinky Play.

Step 3. Just go all out silly with just enough left to the imagination to draw a filthier picture than even I intended. The Cherry Popsicles. Well, one time I crossed over at Laredo into old Mexico and you think the real crazy stuff only happens in Tijuana...but you'd be real wrong. A five dollar transaction and I'm in the filthiest bar ever watching two chicks perform the Cherry Popsicle. I learned alot that day. How God must not exist. That that particular shade can be bodily made. That I could still cry at my age.

25: The Retrosexual Manual

Okay, now this isn't a book for me. This is for those, all I gotta do is touch it sort of feeling guys. Science lesson time. Everybody is born with the basic package of feelings--sympathy, joy, bonhomie, jealousy, and so on. At puberty onset, your brain releases hormones that identify which elements of your emotional spectrum are present in your environment and eliminates those without recognizable matches. Say you were raised in a dour environment by a dysfunctional family--snip snip goes your natural forms of happiness and trust.

sigh...myself, well, they're not supposed to do this, but when I was 11...my feelings...they...molested me. They took advantage of me all alone in a dark room and suddenly and ever since I've been adrift without control seemingly. All I know is, if you're within the sound of voice you are not safe. So run...RUN!

24: Ten Little Indians

Yeah, it's about racism again--there's really no physical limit to the number of these I can do. This is the third of three titles (by appearance order) for this particular book--all of which show how culture attempts to step away from overt racism. The first, and I don't want to even write it out, was Ten Little N-words. yeah the actual title had the real word. They didn't care much about it back when originally published in 1939.

Now, I can't move on without thinking about a comedic bit Louis CK does about inappropriate words including touching on the n-word. To him, and he's right, even using the sorta acceptable substitute just makes you think the original in your mind. Basically, someone has made you think the word aloud in your head without actually saying it themselves--raycess* virus.

The original title was published into the 60s, and by large-shoulda-known-better publishers like Penguin. There were some publishers as far back as 1940 who insisted on a name change, for some reason not universally held obviously, and the title became And Then There Were None which is how the book is generally published today. Ten Little Indians is an alternate title created after the source material was renamed for a movie.

Just the original dust jacket, with raycess name and little raycess caricatures dancing (I'll link here, but have no interest in showing the picture on my blog), costs near fifty dollars itself online. Though, that's not like the only potential racism about. As you can see, my copy names Indians but then adds the perhaps suggestive hanging body--during the 60s, come on! Even the supposed safe title, And Then There Were None can create dark overtones in comparison to the original. Now there's none of them left? Is that your goal, Christie and or publisher?

Regardless, enough people didn't care to the tune of 100 million printed copies--making this the highest selling mystery of all time. I myself own this copy and a more recent And Then There Were None.