Robert Rosen

Writers know "Kill your darlings." It means no matter how much you love a sentence, character, or plotline, if it interferes with a story's coherence or pace, cut it.

 

I've been keeping a file of murdered darlings that I've cut from a book I've been working on about Observation Post, a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York in the 1970s. Here are 10, chosen at random (some of which ended up in a different form in a different part of the book):

 

His cousin was Dylanologist A.J. Weberman.

 

"Reviews are the easiest thing to write," he said. "It's always easier to criticize somebody's else's work than to write your own."

 

The great basketball scandal of 1950, when CCNY won both the NCAA and NIT tournaments, and was then accused of fixing games for the Mob, was the only story I'd heard about the college.

 

He seemed to have a passing familiarity with what others perceived as reality and aspired to place his artwork in Screw.

 

Almost as amusing was a story about the college hiring Dr. Martin Bormann to fill the newly created post of Deputy Assistant Under Dean for Student Development and Enlightenment.

 

The "experimental college" within City College was offering a class in how to roll joints.

 

Fuck the Government and Fuck Nixon were our unifying themes.

 

"The first guy to pick up The Paper* each week is an agent for the CIA and FBI," he said. "They got a file on every member of The Paper."

 

He broke open hydrometers, drained the mercury, and stored it in little glass vials. "I love liquid metal," he said, pouring a few drops into the palm of his hand and watching the tiny silver blobs squirt around as if they were alive.

 

His room looked like an ammo dump—one so aesthetically flawless it could have been featured in Martha Stewart Living.

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*The Paper was the Black and Puerto Rican student newspaper.

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In the years since my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography was published, academia has become a sizzling hotbed of pornographic studies. Beaver Street, in fact, has been referenced in more than a dozen academic books and has become required reading in a number of college courses, mostly in the UK, but also in Italy. If you look up Beaver Street on Perplexity, an AI search engine, you'll find this surprisingly accurate information:

 

Robert Rosen's book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography has gained recognition in academic circles and has been included on college reading lists. The book has been embraced by academia for its unique perspective on the pornography industry.

 
A review of Beaver Street appeared on H-Net, a site for humanities and social sciences, comparing it to academic works on pornography.

Peter Kenneth Alilunas, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, placed Beaver Street at the top of his "Essential Reading" list.

Alilunas's PhD dissertation, Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986, contains numerous references to the book.
 
The Ethics and Politics of Pornography by David Edward Rose, a lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, references Beaver Street in its sixth chapter. This inclusion in a textbook published by Palgrave Macmillan further solidifies the book's academic relevance.

 
Rosen's book stands out for its approach to the subject matter: It provides a serious history that reads like a comic novel.

The book is neither pro-porn nor anti-porn, offering a balanced view.

It covers significant events in the porn industry, such as the advent of phone sex and the Tracy Lords scandal.

This combination of insider knowledge, historical context, and engaging writing style has made Beaver Street a valuable resource for academic study in fields such as sociology, history, and gender studies.

Meanwhile, a trickle of dissertations about porn has become a flood. Check out Academia.edu, a site that classifies these dissertations as "social and cultural anthropology." Here's a list of some of the papers that have popped up in the past few weeks:

 

The Hardest of Hardcore: Locating Feminist Possibilities in Women's Extreme Pornography, by Jennifer Moorman

Does the Porn-Star Blush?: Performing the Real in Post-Transgressive Cinema, by Charlie Blake with Beth Johnson

Sex, Erotic Art, and the Repression of Alternative Movements: The Strange Case of an Esoteric Movie Director, by Massimo Introvigne

Sex on Camera: A Postmodern Feminist Critique on Pornography, by Joe Carl Castillo

The Queer Porn Mafia: Redefining identity, sex and feminism through commodified sexuality, by Laurenn McCubbin

Exploitation, Empowerment, and Ethical Portrayals of the Pornography Industry, by Julie Davin

The Porn Wars [from draft chapter of manuscript, Feminism: an introduction], by Lorna Finlayson

Digital gender-sexual violations and social marketing campaigns, by Matthew Hall

Upskirting, homosociality, and craftmanship: A thematic analysis of perpetrator and viewer interactions, by Matthew Hall

 

It has been my privilege to contribute to this growing body of knowledge.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.

 

Last week, at an Authors Guild reception, a woman approached me and asked what kind of books I write. I told her that my best-known book is Nowhere Man, a John Lennon biography. She said her name was Suzaan Boettger, she was an art historian, and she'd written a biography of the artist Robert Smithson—Inside the Spiral. Since we had something in common, our conversation continued and she said, "You look like a monk."

 

"That's not the first time I've heard something like that," I said. And I told her about an encounter that occurred 40 years ago. I was in the Poconos, in Pennsylvania, and I met a man and a woman who said they were psychic potters and past-lives therapists.

 

"You mean you could tell me what I was in a past life?" I asked.

 

"Yes," the man said.

 

"What was I?"

 

He looked into my eyes and said, "You were an honest priest in a small French village."

 

"Maybe he sensed your purity," Suzaan Boettger said.

 

I don't know if I look like a monk, spent a past life in France, or radiate purity to unsuspecting strangers. I'm merely reporting things of religious significance that people have told me.

 

Above is a photo taken in my workspace the day after the reception. I'll leave it to you to decide what kind of religious figure I look like and how much purity (or lack of purity) I radiate.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.

 

Black Boy, by Richard Wright, was published 80 years ago. The edition I finally got around to reading (and came across by happenstance) contained only the first part, "Southern Night." I didn't know there was a second part, "The Horror and the Glory," until I started writing this. There's no point in reviewing a book I've only half read. Anybody interested in a detailed review can find one elsewhere.

 

But there are a few things I want to say about the first half of Black Boy. For starters, it's the best memoir I've ever read. I can't think of any other autobiographical work that comes close to this book's raw emotional power. It gives you a visceral sense of what it was like to grow up Black in the Jim Crow South of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee in the first half of the 20th century. (Wright was born in 1908.) Yes, I understood what Jim Crow meant: lynching, segregated schools, Black-and-white water fountains, back of the bus, etc. But I didn't fully understand the everyday fear, humiliation, intimidation, and hopelessness of every ordinary interaction with both white people and Black. There's a disturbing scene on virtually every page.

 

One more thing: When Donald Trump says, "Make America Great Again," the America of Black Boy is what he's talking about.

 

Now I've got to read the second half of the book, which solves the problem of what to read next. The first half of Black Boy is a tough act to follow.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.