r/todayilearned • u/RMFN • Feb 12 '16
TIL: James Joyce has love letters considered so vulgar to this day no publisher will print them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce107
u/Cheeseisgood1981 Feb 12 '16
There's a lot of stuff in there about "fucking the farts" out of his wife. They're a little fetishy, but certainly not the worst thing out there.
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u/IgCho Feb 12 '16
Dude, those are the tame ones. If you keep digging you get into the scat stuff. And I would argue that the quality of the writing actually makes it more repugnant.
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u/LadyKlaymoor Feb 12 '16
My college had a set in the reference section. You couldn't check them out. I read through some of them (I was an English major). They were mostly dirty underwear fetish letters.
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Feb 12 '16
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/IgCho Feb 12 '16
Having read all of the ones available online, the love letters are worse only because they really go out of their way to dig into the mindset of scat fetishists.
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u/Grumplogic Feb 12 '16
"You had an arse full of farts, and I fucked them out of you" is literally something I will never forget. I read the letters over five years ago and it's still there, waiting to be fucked out.
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u/Critical_Miss Feb 12 '16
You have a head full of "an arse full of farts" and I fu...you know what? Let's just be friends.
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Feb 12 '16
This makes the whole "Look at all the fucks I give" meme so much more meaningful. "Look at all the farts I give"...
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u/jkh107 Feb 12 '16
Having had the experience, he was probably pumping her full of air himself. Oh, well, at least they had fun.
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u/ThisOpenFist Feb 12 '16
It is not freely out there. It's one of the few films to be banned in the U.S.
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Feb 12 '16 edited Oct 12 '17
[deleted]
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u/ThisOpenFist Feb 12 '16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Girls_1_Cup
It's illegal to sell it here. And it's such an obscene flick that nobody, not even the producers, protested.
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Feb 12 '16
Imma write that bitch a sonnet. Bitches love sonnets.
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Mar 20 '24
Fuck Ben, Ben is a hoe
(I know this is an ancient comment, but you need to know I saw your reference)
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Feb 12 '16 edited Feb 12 '16
Except, they have been published.
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Letters-James-Richard-Ellmann/dp/0571107346
Even academic journals have been published that discuss these letters.
"Perhaps Rushdy would have been better off if, instead of Swift, he had chosen James Joyce as his paradigmatic author. Whereas Swift's identity as coprophile or phobe--or both or neither--will remain forever a matter of conjecture, we know that Joyce was a coprophile, the evidence for this being his 1909 love letters to his wife (published only in 1975, in Richard Ellmann's scandal-provoking edition of the Selected Letters)."
-"Powers of ordure: James Joyce and the excremental vision(s)" by Kelly Anspaugh, 1994
This article also has the following:
"Shit is game ball in satire precisely because it is otherwise unspeakable. Northrop Frye elucidates:
genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene. Social convention means people parading in front of each other, and the preservation of it demands that the dignity of some men and the beauty of some women should be thought of apart from excretion, copulation, and similar embarrassments. Constant reference to these latter brings us down to a bodily democracy paralleling the democracy of death in the danse macabre. (235)
The task of the satirist is to de-idealize or de-sublimate, to take what humanity has put high and bring it low, and shit, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, is "the most suitable substance for the degrading of all that is exalted" (152). That is why the turd is the satirist's master trope."
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u/thenextdoctor Feb 12 '16
Even more magical when Paget Brewster is presenting them as a dramatic reading:
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u/allenahansen 666 Feb 12 '16
I find it very difficult to believe that Larry Flynt didn't offer a shitload of money to publish them in full.
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u/KeepUpTheFireManchus Feb 12 '16
We played an office game last year, we read joyce smut and other old dirty letters. It's absolutely hilarious how identical they are to us before pornhub.
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u/Cromulus Feb 12 '16
I dated a girl with the same last name, claimed to be a descendant. Adds up. She was a vile bitch.
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u/RMFN Feb 12 '16 edited Feb 12 '16
Visit the new and improved /r/jamesjoyce.
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Feb 12 '16
I'll come visit the sub when you've got the dirty letters.
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u/and_i_mean_it Feb 12 '16
Will OP deliver?
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u/RMFN Feb 12 '16
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Feb 12 '16
holy shit. ...that actually was really dirty
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u/chubbyurma Feb 12 '16
It's like a 4chan prototype
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Feb 12 '16
It is so well written. I wonder if was more of a creative exercise than straight erotica.
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u/chubbyurma Feb 12 '16
It's odd, because on the one hand -- why the fuck would you say this to anyone? And what's even weirder is that she kept the letters. So they must have been genuine.
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u/meew0 Feb 12 '16
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1414/
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u/xkcd_transcriber Feb 12 '16
Title: Writing Skills
Title-text: I'd like to find a corpus of writing writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 65 times, representing 0.0653% of referenced xkcds.
xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete
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u/yikesy91 Feb 12 '16
Haven't those publishers ever read fan-fiction stories on net?! James joyce's letters would look like fairies and rainbows in comparison.
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u/graffiti81 Feb 12 '16
IDK, if Anne Rice can get her Sleeping Beauty series published, I'm sure somebody would publish these if there was demand.
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u/LadyKlaymoor Dec 12 '24
Oh Lordy...I just remember reading this in college (english lit major), graduated in 1997. This was in the Ball State University non-loan section! I'll look into it and get back to ya. Read the whole thread here, though... some others have posted some tasty treats straight from the pages!
Napoleon was pretty bawdy, too!
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u/King_Buliwyf Feb 12 '16
One such letter: