Word: delta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rolling alpine meadows and the tundra beyond. At the 253.7-mile mark, a simple sign announces the 66° 30 min. latitude of the Arctic Circle. Then the road continues into the Northwest Territories, meets the Peel and Mackenzie rivers, and heads deep into the low, flat, piney Mackenzie Delta until at last it reaches Inuvik...
...THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Anais Nin created the female language for sexuality." So says the blurb on the back of Delta of Venus, the first posthumous volume of Anais Nin's erotic writing. The paperback edition has gone through four printings, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, knowing a good thing when they see it, have recently brought out a second volume, beautifully printed as the first and likewise bound in real cloth--quite a tribute these days, especially for stories originally written for an anonymous dirty old man at a dollar a page...
...preface of Delta of Venus tells the rueful tale of the cold voice over the telephone with its directive, "Leave out the poetry. Concentrate on sex." The impoverished writers who, along with Nin, wrote for the old man to pay their bills, resented this commandment greatly. At one point Nin wrote him a letter which said in part...
...sounds good, and when I read this in the foreword to Delta of Venus I agreed wholeheartedly. Then I read the book, a strange combination of genuinely sexy and often beautiful writing, affected prose and naive Freudianism. Exotic Chinese and Africans are used as backdrops. Sensual women can be picked out from a crowd by their copies of Lady Chatterly's Lover. A man feels "blocked" and his lover suggests psychoanalysis. I ended up sympathizing somewhat with the poor lonely old codger just trying to get his rocks off and being fed Freudian morality...
...LITTLE BIRDS is a million times worse. One cannot help but feel that the editors at Harcourt Brace, having culled the best stories for the successful Delta of Venus, have now published the dross. Where Delta of Venus is sometimes cloying, Little Birds is actually offensive. While I was somewhat uneasy at the characterizations of huge, lusty men and women who were "genuine whores" in Delta, Nin really comes out of the closet in Little Birds. If there are sadists, they are men. If there are masochists, they are women. The twin gods of Freud and D.H. Lawrence...