The return of Blakely St. James.
Tuesday August 27, 2002
So yeah, I go grocery shopping, I duck into the PastaWorks on Hawthorne for the chi-chi pasta and the wine and the good bread (which they were out of, and it’s not yet time for green wine it seems, damn), and then I duck into the Powell’s right next door, which isn’t the one downtown but what is with the possible exception of maybe the Strand, and yeah, the erotica is on one of the shelves up front in this one, this suburb of the City of Books, and so yeah, I usually troll through it which a few months ago is how I discovered I should have been hanging around Literotica back in the day rather than alt.sex.stories.moderated because, if I’d been hanging around Literotica back in the day, I maybe might have had a story in an anthology (maybe, might have) that has an introduction written by William T. Vollmann, and you know, I could have maybe been holding my head just a mite bit higher.
But this isn’t about that; this is about the shelf full of Christinas they had today. Like new, uncreased, mint condition. $3.98 a pop.
Which considering the prices they usually fetch on eBay and elsewhere—
I don’t think these are actual old-skool copies, no. I don’t think it’s that Powell’s stumbled over a truckload of the stuff and put it out on the shelves without researching the market. For one thing, they’re smarter and more mercenary than that. For another, the model on the cover was different. Still shot in the same cheesy-ass soft-focus bad-lingerie-ad style that, admittedly, is part of their charm. Like a late-period Modess ad, a couple of hours and a snifter of brandy later.
But I can’t find anything about a re-print with a quick poke about the web. (Amazon has bupkes, say.) And $3.98 is fuckin’ cheap for a new paperback these days. And it’s slapped on with a yellow price tag like you might find in a grocery store.
So it’s weird, is what I’m saying. Any bookhounds out there with a clue?
No, it’s not like these are deathless examples of lost ’70s erotica. It’s sleazy snarky jet-set porn written by underpaid hacks (in the best sense of the word) writing under the kick-ass nym of Blakely St. James (had I to do it all over again, I’d be Blake St. James and not Nicholas Urfé) who, if you were lucky and found a good one (I liked the one where she was a sex-goddess-in-residence at a liberal arts college), had zingy word play and a tart sense of genre-kicking humor at play between the fuckfests. But: strictly nostalgia value here, folks. (My parents—specifically, my mother—had a bunch of ’em hidden in one of the bedside tables, along with Nancy Friday and The Pearl and a volume of Penthouse Letters.) —I tried once flipping through an obvious fellow traveller—Nicole at the Grand Prix—and giggled at myself and put it back on the shelf. No zing. (Though the cunnilingus-embouchure joke was pretty good.)
But there was a bippy little acquisitive zing when I saw all those Christinas. Go figure. The heart? gonads? lizard brain? nostalgia-happy inner kid? Whatever it is, it knows what it wants.
And all of which reminds me—I’m way, way overdue in writing back to somebody. Damn. Bad me.
I have a few old copies of the Christina series and, even though there is more sophisticated erotica around, nothing does it for me like those good old novels – I am always looking for back copies. I am in Australia and there is not too many lying around here anymore. Do you know of any online examples of these novels?
— Gedda Jul 4, 05:22 AM #