James Joyce: pervert. Actually, this is quite funny. But we need a little backstory first:

Joyce's erotic output takes the form a brief series of letters that he wrote in late 1909 to Nora Barnacle, his long-time partner, mother to his two children, and eventual wife. Separated when Joyce returned to Dublin in attempt to sell his manuscript for Dubliners and to open a movie theatre, Joyce wrote these emphatically erotic letters to his Nora, who had remained in Trieste, then part of Austro-Hungary, now part of Italy. The letters were first published in 1975 as part of Richard Ellmann's Select Joyce Letters (since out of print); Stephen Joyce has refused to let them be published since.

But the cat is certainly out of the bag, for the letters remain, and in just three short years, the copyright on them will expire. In the meantime their contents remain in print, a silent, florid, earthy testament to Joyce's profoundly fleshy love of his wife, anal sex, female masturbation, spanking, poop, white cotton underthings and farts, in no specific order. You read these letters and you get a visceral sense of Joyce's passion for his wife--her "rank red cunt," her "fat thighs," the "whorish movement" of her mouth, and her "naughty bare bum." You read these letters, and you get a glimpse into what masturbatory machinations sent Joyce reeling--his profound mixture of the sacred and the profane, his need for the most filthy sort of sanctification, and his conflicted joy over the cuckoldry playing out on the walls of his mind.

Oh, my. Tell us more, you dear, dirty Dubliner!

"I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways," Joyce writes on 8 December. Recalling a specific night of anal sex, he writes,

"It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole."

A day later, Joyce would command Nora to write a naughty letter back to him; he instructed her, "hold [the letter] for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your dear little farting bum. Do more if you wish and send the letter then to me, my darling brown-arsed fuckbird."

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[Anna Amateur]

The best of all governments is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.