Word: legman
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Back in the early '50s, the U.S. Post Office found Love and Death obscene and refused to deliver mail to Legman's Bronx home-a small, rundown cottage furnished ceiling to floor with books and cats. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife packed their belongings, including one of the world's largest private collections of erotic and scatological literature, and moved to France. Since the death of his wife in 1966, he has remarried and fathered three children. The Legman home is on fifteen acres in Valbonne...
...Legman has remained in Europe, with the exception of a misspent year teaching at the San Diego campus...
University of California in 1964-65. His principal subject was folklore, but his favorite activity seems to have been creating the Legend of Gershon Legman. "The kids would space out, disappear," he says. "I used to burn bonfires of pot in a living-room grate. The campus was rotten with drugs. At one stage, I got banned from speaking to the students because I ran two courses called Orgasm I and Orgasm II. They were about literature. If it had been Violence I and II, there would have been no problem...
Pocked Dignity. Legman's revenge was Fake Revolt (1967), an overheated assault on the youth rebellion. "COOL," he concluded, "is the new venereal disease." Despite such desert-prophet eruptions, Legman's scholarship continued. The Limerick is a massive accumulation of the world's most suggestive examples. The Horn Book contains studies in erotic folklore. The Guilt of the Templars is about heresy and sexual perversion in the medieval order of the Knights Templar. Ora genitalism is an elegantly written and anything but smutty study subtitled "Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation." Legman is also an authority on origami...
...Diderot of the dirty joke that Legman will be best remembered, although Rationale contains enough ravings against the inauthenticities of popular culture to earn him another title -the Carrie Nation of kitsch. He is also the Joe McCarthy of heterosexuality who looks for gays under every bed, a man who professes to love woman but whose opinions reveal a lover of the Vic torian idea of Woman, and a Jeremiah who sees the world ending in nuclear war or a fecal flood of pollution...