Robert Rosen

In part 2 of my Kendra Holliday interview, "How the U.S. Government Really Feels About Child Pornography," the editor of The Beautiful Kind interrogates me about Traci Lords, Annie Sprinkle, Ron Jeremy, and my literary influences.

I tell her everything I know.

Stay tuned for part 3 on Friday. Read More 

In the course of my writing career I've done hundreds of promotional interviews. Most of them are a blur of canned questions asked by people who didn't read the book and in some cases probably didn't even read the press release. This is typical. Most writers will tell you the same thing. However, since I began promoting Beaver Street six months ago, I've been lucky. All of my inquisitors have been passionate about the book.

Kendra Holliday, whom I’ve been communicating with by e-mail and telephone, is the editor of The Beautiful Kind. She describes herself as “a 38 year old bisexual mother located in St. Louis,” and “a passionate sexplorer” of “kinks, fetishes, BDSM, swinging, and polyamory.”

Well, I can certainly vouch for her passion, at least when it comes to Beaver Street. She’s the kind of reader every writer hopes for.

I consider myself extremely fortunate that Kendra thought enough of Beaver Street to conduct an extensive interview. Here’s a link to Part 1, titled, “Does Nothing Shock You?”

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Last night, after six months of nonstop promotion on two continents, Beaver Street surged, albeit briefly, to the top of the heap. True, the heap in question is Amazon UK's Bestsellers in Pornography Biographies. But it is a heap that includes such classics of the genre as Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Ron Jeremy's The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz, and Annie Sprinkle's Post-Porn Modernist.

I’ll take my number ones where I can get them.

This sudden surge, I imagine, can be attributed to my two recent interviews on The Sleazoid Podcast, as well as word of mouth. As I’ve been saying all along, Beaver Street is a page-turner. Once you pick it up, you won’t be able to put it down, even if porn isn’t a subject that particularly interests you. Because the subject matter of Beaver Street goes far beyond porno. Don’t take my word for it. Read some of the Amazon reviews. Or just buy the damn book and see for yourself.

I’ll also go so far to say that this is going to be the first of many number ones, brief and otherwise, in numerous categories both on Amazon UK and Amazon US, when the book is published here in March 2012. How do I know this? I just do. Call me a prophet.

In the meantime, I’ll take a day to quietly celebrate Beaver Street's first visit to the “Toppermost of the Poppermost,” as a certain British rock band used to say. Read More 

 

In the second and final part of my Sleazoid Podcast interview (which is no longer available anywhere on the Internet), I discuss two of the key events at the heart of Beaver Street.

The first is my experience posing for a porn shoot, which I explore in a chapter called "The Accidental Porn Star." This was both an effort to gain insight into a porn star's state of mind, and an experiment in participatory journalism. I wanted to take journalism to a place it had never been before, and no real writer had ever stepped in front of a camera and reported on what it was like to have sex. More interesting than this sordid act of exhibitionism, however, was my colleagues’ horrified and disgusted reaction to what became known as "The Five Dollar Blowjob."

Then I examine America’s sexual schizophrenia in the chapter titled “So You Want to Talk About Traci Lords.” Why, I ask, did the government treat as a victim a juvenile delinquent with a fraudulent passport and driver’s license who systematically sought work in the porn industry, and treat the photographers and filmmakers who hired her as criminals?

Allow me to take a morning off from exploring the meaning of the Third Reich and its impact on the good people of mid-century Flatbush, as I've been doing in the book I'm currently writing, tentatively titled Bobby in Naziland, and instead say a few more words about Beaver Street, scheduled for U.S. release in five months, on March 23, 2012.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention to this site’s home page may have noticed that my campaign to bring Beaver Street to the widest possible audience is already underway. Last week, The Sleazoid Podcast posted Part One of their interview with me, and boy, do they ever let me talk—about everything from my days as the editor of a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York, at a time when the energy of the anti-war movement was giving way to an emerging punk sensibility, to my tenure as an editor at Swank Publications during Porn’s Golden Age. They’ve also put together a very cool trailer, above, to promote the interview. Part 2 should be posted any day.

This is how it’s going to be for the next five months and beyond, a long march, blog by blog, reader by reader, as I talk to anybody who wants to talk to me about Beaver Street—an exhausting but necessary process, though one that I welcome and enjoy.

The alternative, of course, would be to stop believing in evolution and promote my book by running for president as a Republican. Seems to work for Herman Cain.

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A few months ago, I wrote a series of reviews about five articles that Slate had cited as "great writing" about the porn industry. Some of these articles, I thought, were hardly examples of great writing, and one of them was barely about the porn industry.

Recently, one of the writers I critiqued responded on her Forbes.com blog to my review of her porn book and to general criticism of her work. In a piece called “This Is Why You’re Stupid, or How to Deal with Criticism on the Internet,” Susannah Breslin took issue with anonymous posters who’ve called her a “c***,” a “f***ing moron,” and a “festering boil.” Her conclusion: Don’t blog if you don’t have a thick skin, and it’s better to get a vicious reaction than no reaction at all. I couldn’t agree more, especially about the thick skin.

I’ve written similar pieces myself, most recently comparing two Nowhere Man reviews that appeared on Amazon the same day, one a five-star rave (in Italian) and the other (since deleted) a one-star hatchet job. I pointed out that this is a microcosm of the type of criticism that Nowhere Man has been subjected to for the past 11 years, that it’s as if the critics had read two different books, and that it’s always the most ignorant critics who post the most vicious comments.

In any case, Breslin devoted a good portion of her blog to analyzing my criticism of her book They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?. She didn’t like my comparing her to the late Andrea Dworkin because Dworkin, she said, was “passionately anti-porn” and she isn’t. She thinks it’s unlikely that Senator Orrin Hatch will use her book as evidence in his anti-porn crusade, as I predicted. She disliked the fact that I called her writing “humorless” because, she insisted, she has a sense of humor. And she said I seemed to suggest that Beaver Street is a better book than They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?.

Well, I’ve reread my critique of Breslin’s book, and I think it still stands up. Breslin might not be like Andrea Dworkin, the person, but her book is definitely anti-porn in a way that Dworkin would have liked. And Breslin’s thesis—that porn is bad, stupid, ugly, and violent—plays right into Orrin Hatch’s hands, confirming everything he says about the industry and the need to investigate it more vigorously. (His crusade appears to have stalled for the time being, which may be why he hasn’t yet presented Breslin’s book as evidence.)

I didn’t say that Breslin doesn’t have a sense of humor. One can indeed be detected in “This Is Why You’re Stupid.” I described the mood of They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They? as “grim and humorless”—because it is.

And finally, I didn’t suggest that Beaver Street is a better book than They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?. I said only that Breslin covered some similar material in her book, specifically, “the predilection of conservative administrations, like Bush II, to declare war on porn, often with embarrassing results.”

Ms. Breslin, I feel as if we’re playing tennis, and the blog’s back in your court. But before you return my serve, perhaps you should decide for yourself how Beaver Street stacks up against They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?. U.S. pub date is March 23, 2012. Review copies are available now, and, in my opinion, you’re more qualified than most people to review it. Beaver Street, I might add, is very much up your pink slip and recession alley.

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I went down to Zuccotti Park yesterday to again take the temperature of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Here's my report:

The reason Eric Cantor is calling the demonstrators a "mob" is because they're screaming for the blood of politicians like Eric Cantor, who defend the wealthy at the expense of everybody else--the 99% that the demonstrators keep referring to.

If I were an investment banker, my blood would have run cold when I heard the flag-waving, drum-pounding demonstrators chanting, “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” as they marched from the statue of the Wall Street Bull, adjacent to Beaver Street, to Zuccotti Park.

The demonstrators are really fucking angry, and anybody who can’t understand why is willfully ignorant. Most of them are students or recent graduates whose education left them with a crushing debt that they’re unable to even think about paying off because there are no decent jobs.

In Zuccotti Park, now surrounded by police and media, the Spirit of the 60s has been reborn in all its ragged, funky glory.

I’d have been really insulted if Beaver Street hadn’t been checked out of the Occupy Wall Street Free Library. Read More 

The countdown clock you see here, marking the time until Beaver Street is published in the US, signifies another change in this website and in this blog in particular. As regular readers are aware, I've been posting here five days a week—on Beaver Street itself, occasionally on Nowhere Man, and on whatever might be happening in the world that I feel like writing about, like the riots in the UK and, more recently, the Occupy Wall Street protests.

For the next few months, until the US Beaver Street launch, I’ll be posting here more sporadically, adhering to no particular schedule. Naturally, I’ll continue to comment on any significant Beaver developments, as well as the recent publication of the Italian edition of Nowhere Man. But it’s time for me to focus more of my energies on other things, like the new book I’ve been writing.

So I’d like to send out a big Thank You! to everybody’s who’s bought Beaver Street (and Nowhere Man in any language), to all the critics and journalists who’ve written about my books (or are planning to), and especially to the regular readers of this blog—the ones who’ve checked in every day, and gave me a reason to keep doing it.

Keep in touch, and stay tuned for some big changes.

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Liberty Park (aka Zuccotti Park), where three weeks ago the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators set up camp, is about a mile from where I live. I've been dropping by there on a regular basis, usually in the late afternoon, to take the temperature, so to speak.

The temperature is rising.
The energy remains peaceful, cooperative.
The free food provided makes the atmosphere seem almost Woodstockian.
The drum circle continues to provide the heartbeat.
There is an edge.

It occurred to me that it wouldn’t take much of a spark to set off something more confrontational, and possibly ugly, as police encircle the park.

At least one liberal New York Times columnist, Charles Blow, disagrees. He said that the occupation “feels like a spark set down on wet grass: It’s just hard to see how it truly catches fire.” In a front-page article, a protester was quoted as saying that the occupation will end when the temperature drops below 50 degrees.

The Times, which depends on companies like Tiffany’s, and real estate brokers selling $5-million condos, for advertising revenue, is never going to endorse the occupation.

I think that when the occupation continues into the dead of winter, the media will begin to draw analogies with Valley Forge. And, if they’re smart, companies like Marmot and The North Face will donate winter clothing, and local stores, like Paragon, will donate camping gear.

I stopped by again on Sunday and donated a copy of Beaver Street to the free library. The librarian—yes, they have a librarian—graciously accepted my donation. I departed with a free copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

A few blocks to the south, near Beaver Street, the Wall Street Bull is now surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. He needs them.

You can follow the occupation on their website or on Twitter. Read More 

Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian novelist best known for his book The Alchemist, which has sold 65-million copies worldwide. What sets Coelho apart from virtually every other working writer on the planet is that he pirates his own work on his own website. Ideas, he believes, should be free, and books should be available to people who can't afford to buy them. The only thing Coelho asks of readers who download his free novels is that if they like the book, and can afford it, they should then buy a copy to send a message to the book-publishing industry that "sharing contents is not life threatening."

I’m a working writer who has an opinion about everything, but when I read about Coelho’s sales strategy in The New York Times the other day, it left me speechless. If I were to call any of my publishers, in any country, and tell them that I’d like to try increasing sales by making Beaver Street and Nowhere Man available for free, I don’t think they’d say, “Great idea! Let’s do it!” Even a radical, freethinking publisher like Headpress.

But I’m not about to make such a phone call. Because as often as I’ve proven that I’m willing to go anywhere and do anything to sell books, and as much as I like the idea of disseminating my work to people who can’t afford to buy it, the idea of making it available for free to anybody frightens me. I’m too cynical to have the kind of faith in the human race that Paulo Coelho has.

And yet, he’s sold tens of millions of books and I haven’t. Which only means I have something new (and frightening) to think about over this first weekend of the year 5772.

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Today, Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Jewish New Year, 5772, is one of the two Jewish holidays I acknowledge. My wife and I will go down to the Hudson River with some stale bread and, according to tradition, cast our sins upon the water. Usually the seagulls eat the bread. "What a relief," I'll then say. "They didn’t turn black." The birds, that is.

I like the Jewish New Year because I feel as if I’m getting a second chance to re-live the year designated in the last two digits—’72 in this case. Yes, it’s the ’70s again, and 1972 was an especially interesting year. The energy of the ’60s was still very much alive, and having recently transformed myself into a radical hippie, I’d become an editor on Observation Post, the “alternative” student newspaper at the City College of New York, where the remnants of the SDS and Weather Underground had fused with an emerging punk sensibility.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that kind of energy. But I felt it yesterday when I went down to Liberty Square, where the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have set up camp. Galvanized by both ridicule in the mainstream media and a cop’s unprovoked pepper-spray attack on a woman demonstrator the other day, the motley gathering veritably exuded the Spirit of 1968 (5729). “There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear…” is the way Buffalo Springfield put it in those electrifying days.

The demonstrators’ energy was focused around a tribal drum circle on the Broadway side of the park. People were pounding out an infectious rhythm on drums, cymbals, and garbage cans. They were playing tubas, trumpets, and washboards. And they were dancing, while a few yards away, on Broadway, a chorus line of demonstrators held up signs demanding economic and social justice. It was uplifting, hopeful, and magical in a way that’s difficult to quantify, but obvious to anybody who was there.

And take my word for it—these people aren’t going anywhere. Because most of them have nothing to lose and nowhere better to go. They’re serious, angry, unemployed, and dug in for the long haul. Ignore them at your peril.

Happy New Year, Wall Street.

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In the twilight of my career as a porn editor, when the market for print magazines was collapsing in the face of free Internet smut, my esteemed publisher told me to produce two fetish magazines that were the antithesis of what turned me on personally.

As a porno professional, I’d learned to take such assignments in stride. After all, I’d just spent a dozen years editing mags like D-Cup, Stacked, and Bra Busters, which, as the names imply, are devoted to gargantuan breasts. Though my preference is for a slim, well-toned female body, I had no trouble with this assignment. I dare say I even learned to appreciate such oversize appendages, especially when they were beautifully photographed and attached to a gorgeous woman.

This was not the case with Plump & Pink and Buf. Though the former, whose models tended towards more-than-a-little chubby, was tolerable, the latter took me into a world I barely knew existed. Buf models were often 500-700 pounds, were photographed in a purposely amateurish way that tended to exaggerate their least attractive qualities, and they participated in a fetish in which their partners grew sexually aroused by feeding them things like fried chicken and chocolate cake, and watching them grow fatter.

Though the magazine sold well, putting it together made me physically ill.

I mention this now because of a recently published book called Big Big Love: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them), by Hanne Blank. Though I’ve not read it and have no intention of doing so, the book sounds like a pep talk for fat people and people who enjoy having sex with them. And Blank, apparently, explores the line between fat admiration and fat fetishism, which sounds like the same line that divided Plump & Pink from Buf.

This is all well and good, as there are a lot of people out there, fat and skinny, who are deeply interested in having sex with the overweight. Some of them might be reading this blog. So, if you’re one of them, here’s a link to an interview with Ms. Blank.

Enjoy! Just don’t ask me to edit your favorite magazine.

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Much of the time I spent writing Beaver Street was devoted to research. It took me about a year to unearth all the information I needed for the Traci Lords chapter alone. Though time consuming, the problem wasn't finding material. Between Lords and the Meese Commission, there was too much material, and the challenge was to sift through it all, figure out what was important, and then integrate it into my narrative.

Carl Ruderman, the anonymous publisher of High Society magazine, posed an entirely different problem. The “Invisible Man of Smut,” as Al Goldstein called him, hid behind figurehead publisher Gloria Leonard and went to great lengths to keep his name out of the media, at least in connection with anything having to do with porn. In fact, as I said in Beaver Street, “an internet or library search for any connection between pornography and Carl Ruderman produces little that’s concrete or substantiated.”

Well, that’s changed since the book was published. In the past year, much that connects Carl Ruderman to pornography has been popping up on the internet. One example that I wrote about a few months ago was an article in the New York Observer that bore the headline, “Porn’s ‘Invisible Man’ Prices His Condos at $13.5 M.”

Yesterday, I found something even juicer: the Justice Department’s 1987 appeal of the dismissal of an indictment against Ruderman for “various federal obscenity crimes in connection with the operation of a ‘dial it’ telephone service whereby persons could call a New York City telephone number and listen to a sexually suggestive, pre-recorded message.”

You can read the entire document by clicking here.

I’ve posted this link for my own reference and as a service to any future researchers who want to cast more light on a man who revolutionized the porn industry but has, for the most part, managed to escape being credited (or indicted) for what he did. Read More 

I received word from Headpress the other day that Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography will be published in trade paperback in the United States on March 23, 2012. It will also be available as an e-book in all formats, including Kindle.

Beaver People, start your countdown! It's only six months to springtime.

I’m especially excited about the Kindle edition. Over the past few months, Kindle (and other e-readers) has reached a tipping point in New York. Not only do I see more and more of them on the subway, but when I tell people about Beaver Street, their first question is often, “Is it available on Kindle?” Indeed, people have told me that they will only buy a book if it is available on Kindle. (Yes, I know, you love your Kindles.)

I’m also aware that a certain segment of the reading public prefer not to be seen on subways and buses reading a book titled Beaver Street. Well, with an e-book, nobody can see what you’re reading. But please, promise me, when strangers inquire why you’re laughing out loud, you’ll tell them it’s because you’re reading Beaver Street.

Okay, then, I’ve got six months to prepare for the big day. All I can tell you at this point is that I'm going to have a publication party in an appropriately sleazy bar on Beaver Street, in downtown Manhattan. You’re all invited.

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The best lesson I've learned about reviews since the publication of Nowhere Man in 2000 is that a vicious review will sell as many books as a rave review. And, God knows, I've gotten enough of both to speak with authority on the subject. In fact, since Nowhere Man was published in Italy this week, two more reviews of the book have been posted--a five-star rave on Amazon Italy (in Italian) and a one-star hatchet job on Amazon Germany (in English). These critiques serve as a microcosm of what Nowhere Man has been subjected to for the past 11 years.

What I find fascinating about such divergent opinions is that the reviewers appear to be talking about two entirely different books. It’s a perfect illustration of the Oscar Wilde quote from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”

Antony, the Italian reviewer, described Nowhere Man as an “excellent” book, and a narrative that “portrays a rock star as very sensitive and vulnerable.” He also said that the author and Paolo Palmieri, the translator, “have made John Lennon one of us,” and that it’s “a book to always have on hand, and occasionally to open and read a few lines to understand the simplicity” of life.

Dulce Erdt, the German reviewer, however, said that Nowhere Man is “confusing” and “revolting,” lacks “sensitivity” and “respect,” paints a “too negative” portrait of Lennon, and then insists, “We all know that John Lennon was not a ‘nowhere’ man, why is this author trying to tell the world the contrary?”

The other good lesson I learned about reviews is to never argue with critics, especially ignorant ones, like Dulce Erdt. But sometimes their ignorance is just too overwhelming to ignore. Which is why I will take this opportunity to point out to Fraulein Erdt that some of us are aware that Lennon’s song “Nowhere Man” is autobiographical. In other words, I didn’t have to tell the world about Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” status. He beat me to it by 34 years.

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If you've read Beaver Street (or Nowhere Man for that matter) then you know that my interests range far beyond pornography and rock 'n' roll, into such areas as the rule of law and government corruption. And though I don't know enough about the Troy Davis case to render an informed opinion about his guilt or innocence, I do know enough about capital punishment to say with assurance that it's a barbaric, racist, and deeply flawed practice, and that the United States is the only country in the industrialized Western World that executes prisoners.

Last night, the state of Georgia, in the name of the American people, executed Troy Davis by lethal injection for a murder he was found guilty of committing 22 years ago. I won’t go into any detail here about the hundreds of thousands of people, including many staunchly in favor of capital punishment, who had grave doubts about Davis’s guilt. You can read about it on the Internet if you want to know more.

But I did watch the drama play out on TV, as the Supreme Court considered, then denied, a last-minute stay of execution. Then I heard the news that Davis went to his death proclaiming his innocence.

It sickened me and made me ashamed to be an American.

That’s all I have to say for now about this case in particular, or capital punishment in general. But I would like to share with you the above video, “Song for Troy Davis,” by Nellie McKay.

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Having had my John Lennon bio published this week in Italy, and hopeful that Beaver Street, which is about pornography and politics, will soon follow suit, I've been keeping an eye on any news of sex and politics to emerge from the declining Roman Empire. I found this:

Porn star Cicciolina (real name Ilona Staller), who made her hardcore debut in 1983 in a film titled Il telefono rosso (The Red Telephone), starred in 40 more XXX-rated movies, and was then elected to the Italian Parliament in 1987 and served one five-year term, has ignited a bitter uproar in her adopted country.

The Hungarian-born former MP, who was once married to artist Jeff Koons, and offered to have sex with Osama bin Laden if he’d renounce terrorism, will turn 60 in November and begin collecting a taxpayer-funded lifetime pension of more than $53,000 a year.

Though this is a standard pension for any one-term MP, ordinary Italians are furious, as they believe Cicciolina did nothing while in office except attempt to pass a dozen sex-related bills, such as one to set up “love parks and hotels.”

Parliament, meanwhile, recently passed an austerity package, and politicians—while they continue to collect an annual salary and expense package totaling more than $335,000—are now asking the rest of the country to make painful sacrifices to prevent a Greek-style financial crisis.

Cicciolina, however, feels she earned her pension and is as proud of her government work as she is of her sex work.

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There's no question that this blog can often seem self-obsessed, but, really, if I don't promote my work, who is going to promote it? That's just the nature of the book business, where it's every author for himself. And in city like New York, where everybody is self-obsessed, and the book-publishing industry is not exactly known for its generosity of spirit, it's a survival strategy.

Which brings us to my fellow New Yorker Shade Rupe, author of the Headpress book Dark Stars Rising. Shade, whom I’ve spoken to on the phone and occasionally communicate with on Facebook, but have never actually met, has managed to get my attention on two occasions this past month. The first time was when I was buying tickets to see Tree of Life at the Sunshine Cinema on East Houston Street. There was Dark Stars Rising on display in the box office—the first time I’d ever seen a book of any kind on sale in a movie box office. “Well done,” I thought, happy to see the Headpress logo in such an unexpected place.

The second time was yesterday, when I saw Dark Stars Rising in the window of Shakespeare’s, the independent bookstore on Broadway, in Greenwich Village. Having never looked at the book, I went inside to check it out, and was greeted by a Dark Stars Rising poster hanging on the wall, near the entrance. But the book was sold out, except for the copy in the window, which a clerk retrieved for me. I didn’t have time to thumb through all 568 pages, but I did read part of Shade’s interview with Divine, which was compelling.

So, Shakespeare’s, what are you waiting for? Order more copies of Dark Stars Rising. There’s money to be made! And again, well done Shade and Headpress. Can’t wait to see what happens when Beaver Street lands on these shores in 2012.

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As Yoko Ono would be inclined to point out, yesterday, on the 18th day of the 9th month, the first article about the impending publication of Nowhere Man: Gli ultimi giorni di John Lennon (Coniglio) appeared in the Italian press. And what's extraordinary about this story, that ran in Il Tirreno, is that the book's translator (and my Italian Avatar), Paolo Palmieri, is mentioned in the headline, which roughly translates as "John Lennon's Diaries Translated by Palmieri."

Never before have I seen a translator featured so prominently in an article about Nowhere Man. But in this case the credit is well deserved—without Paolo, there would be no Italian edition.

This is really a story about a local boy who’s made good. The article says that Paolo’s translation of this international bestseller, born of Lennon’s personal diaries, has brought merit to his hometown of Piombino.

Paolo says his translation is “an act of love for a musician who I’ve always loved,” and that he’d dreamed of going to New York to meet the ex-Beatle, but Lennon was murdered before he could make the trip.

Already on sale in some bookstores, Nowhere Man’s “official” publication day is September 22.

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At first glance, Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, appears to be a more rational version of the late Andrea Dworkin, who believed that watching porn led to rape, and that sexual intercourse was the equivalent of rape.

But I've found that after watching Dines debate Ron Jeremy; watching a few of her lectures on YouTube (in one she calls Vanity Fair magazine "pornography"); and reading a couple of her articles, my sympathy for her point of view is rapidly diminishing, even though I tend to agree with some of what she says. (Yes, some pornography is abusive and disgusting.) It simply grows tiresome to listen to a woman whose favorite phrase, repeated ad nauseum, is "body-punishing sex."

An article by Dines, “Time to Start Telling the Truth About the Porn Industry,” posted on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Website, offers a concise summary of her views. In the piece, Dines takes on the authors of the Australian Porn Report, whom, she says, want to “sanitize porn as a bit of harmless fun” and “seem willfully detached from the realities of how porn functions as a global industry and as a storytelling device.”

In other words, these Australian “academics, public intellectuals, and plain old pornographers” disagree with Dines’s suggestion that, according to her research, the most popular porn sites display a “mind-numbing repetition” of “gagging, slapping, verbal abuse, hair-pulling, pounding anal sex, women smeared in semen, sore anuses and vaginas, distended mouths, and exhausted, depleted, and shell-shocked women.”

Or, to put it simply, “body-punishing sex.”

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I didn't know John Lennon had any Italian in him until I saw the cover of Nowhere Man: Gli ultimi giorni di John Lennon, which, I'm told, goes on sale in bookstores throughout Italy today. It is, of course, the cigarette in Lennon's hand that somehow gives him that Italian look. And as far as I know, it's the only cover of any Lennon bio in any language that shows him smoking.

The book should soon be available on the Internet, as well, but in a land where Kindle doesn’t exist, the real Nowhere Man action, I’m told, is going to be in le librerie of Rome, Milan, and… Piombino.

Yes, Piombino, a picturesque Tuscan city on a promontory jutting into the Mediterranean, where on a clear day you can see Elba. This is where my translator and Italian Avatar, Paolo Palmieri, lives. I’ve been there, and there’s a lot of Beatles energy in this town.

One place you can feel it is in Il Pinguino café on Piazza Della Costituzione. The owner, Simone, a published poet whose last name escapes me, has decorated the walls of his café with photos of the Beatles. When he heard that I’d written Nowhere Man, he recited for me—with Paolo supplying a simultaneous translation—a poem he’d written about the night Lennon was murdered, “The Last Tolls of Your Footsteps.”

So, if you find yourself in Piombino, perhaps stopping off there on your way to Elba or Sardinia, why not head over to Il Pinguino and say ciao to Simone. He might read you a poem. And, oh yeah, check out the wall in his Beatles room. I hear my picture’s hanging there, too.

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The good people of The Sleazoid Podcast wouldn't be the first to suggest that Beaver Street is a movie that needs to be made. R.C. Baker, of The Village Voice, said in his Amazon review, "Vivid and funny, Beaver Street moves at a cinematic pace, a period piece that picks up the story of modern porn where Boogie Nights leaves off." And, of course, I, too, have entertained such big-screen fantasies, musing over the possibility of Martin Scorsese directing (Who does sleazy and gritty better?), Justin Timberlake portraying a younger me, and Paul Slimak, whom I call Henry Dorfman in the book, playing himself. (Check out Slimak's work in the Beaver Street promotional video, above.)

Whether or not a filmmaker comes along and snaps up the rights to Beaver Street is obviously beyond my control, and I’m not about to max out my credit cards producing the movie myself. But with Beaver Street scheduled to be published in the US sometime in 2012 and Nowhere Man about to undergo an Italian Renaissance, I’m feeling unusually optimistic.

So, I’m putting the idea out there, my daily message in a bottle: Come on, Hollywood, let’s make Beaver Street, the movie. If it ain’t a natural, I don’t know what is.

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Posting on this blog often strikes me as the cyber-equivalent of sending out messages in bottles. I cast my words upon the great ocean of the Internet, and who knows who's going to see them. And if somebody does see them, who knows how they're going to react or if they're going to react at all.

And though The Daily Beaver and Beaver Street itself have been consistently provoking positive reactions from all levels of the culture, highbrow to lowbrow, it still comes as a surprise each time it happens.

It happened again yesterday. The Sleazoid Podcast, which I was unfamiliar with, had some rather kind things to say about Beaver Street. If you click on this link, you can hear them beginning about 18 minutes into the show.

The host, Mike Ashcraft, having read a Beaver Street review, now wants to read the book because it was written by the author of the John Lennon bio Nowhere Man, and because “It’s an expose completely blowing the lid off the adult industry.” So he ordered it from Amazon—apparently from one of the marketplace sellers, as it hasn’t yet been published here.

“Beaver Street?” said Ashcraft’s co-host. “It sounds like a movie we all need to make.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Ashcraft has already invited me to come on The Sleazoid Podcast and talk about Beaver Street. Dear readers, I am so ready to talk.

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Nasty business, academia. Imagine what it must be like to say something inconsequential about an obscure theory only to have 14 other professors in your department, all of whom are competing for the last remaining tenured position, drag you into a metaphorical dark alley and viciously pummel you to within an inch of your professional life.

I got a taste of this kind of scholarly brutality when I sent to the so-called anonymous professor who once edited Swank magazine (I call him “Jack”) the H-Net review comparing Beaver Street to Whitney Strub’s Perversion for Profit. (Jack had previously weighed in with his opinion about Beaver Street.)

At the time I sent it to him, I was still not aware that a revised version of the essay, by Patrick Glen, PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, had been published on H-Net, and I lightheartedly suggested that “Jack” had written it himself, on a sojourn to England.

Here is the anonymous professor’s response to “Free Speech and Competitively Priced Smut: Pornography in the United States,” an essay that I thought was brilliant, and that another reader has lauded as “the first scholarly paper to refer to the ‘insertion of fifteen billiard balls into a man’s anus followed by an elbow-deep fist-fucking.’”

Hey Bob,
I may have been a bit slow in responding to this for a reason—it is a gargantuan pile of silliness. First, from the spelling and punctuation, it is safe to assume the review is from the UK (or perhaps Oz.) Second, its possibly valiant attempt to merge a post-mod theoretical study (meaning it is largely improvised according to political need) and your authentic and gritty memoirs is sad and strained. I wouldn’t be the first to compare the former to a type of mental masturbation that aligns reality with the titillating prospect of a “reasonable” theoretical outcome, no matter how outrageously this interferes with perceived facts. I’m afraid I don’t have the energy or inclination to respond more fully, but I’ll add that the stylistic errors throughout attest to a desire to put the message before the medium, to the certain detriment of both.

Frankly I enjoyed best Sonja’s comment—“I’m one of those women that worked as an art director for D-Cup. I assure you I am a feminist.”—which simply blew apart the absurd posing of both the “academic” study and the review itself. Pfft.

Jack

PS—I’d probably give him a C-. He’s fairly articulate, though makes stylistic errors that a grad student should not. (Was there no editor?) The main problem is that his approach is simply wrong-headed—it follows a construct that is largely improvisational and therefore less than useful. He does (perhaps by accident) make some useful observations.

Do we have a genuine, take-no-prisoners academic controversy brewing? One can hope. Read More 

As I prepare for Beaver Street's inevitable US publication sometime in 2012, it has come to my attention that the book has achieved an unusual cultural hat trick, so to speak.

The highbrow critics (H-Net) like Beaver Street.

The middlebrow critics (Vanity Fair, The Village Voice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) like Beaver Street.

The lowbrow critics (Bizarre) like Beaver Street.

And if you add the sex critics (Erotic Review) and the chorus of professional, semi-professional, and amateur critics on Amazon US and UK who have weighed in with unanimous five-star reviews… well, one might be tempted to argue that Beaver Street is a dirty book with universal appeal.

But one would be best advised to hold his or her tongue until Traci Lords, the right-wing media, and others with delicate sensibilities render their opinions.

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Last week my Italian translator, Paolo Palmieri, informed me that he had in his hands five printed copies of the Italian edition of Nowhere Man: Gli ultimi giorni di John Lennon, and that the book would be on sale in Italy in a few weeks. Could there be a more appropriate country for a Nowhere Man Renaissance?

My literary relationship with Paolo began three years ago, when I received an e-mail from a stranger in Tuscany who’d read an English language edition of Nowhere Man. “Why,” he asked, “is there no Italian edition?”

“Good question,” I replied.

Paolo took it upon himself to find a publisher—Coniglio—and then translate the book. For the first time I’ve had an opportunity to work closely with a translator, and clarify, over the course of about a thousand e-mails, the countless words and passages that would have otherwise been lost or obscured in translation, which Paolo then explained in footnotes—the first foreign language edition to do so. This translation, in short, is a labor of love.

Now that the book exists, Paolo is going to give readings, talk about it to the media, blog about it, tweet about it, and promote it in any way he can think of. Which makes him a lot more than my translator. He is my Italian Avatar.

It’s been more than 11 years since the original hardcover edition of Nowhere Man was published in the United States. Can we all just agree now that the book is a classic?

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The scholarly analysis comparing Beaver Street to Whitney Strub's Perversion for Profit that I wrote about last week is showing signs of being a turning point in Beaver Street's publication.

The essay, titled "Free Speech and Competitively Priced Smut: Pornography in the United States," by Patrick Glen of The University of Sheffield, and published on the humanities and social sciences site H-Net, seems to have persuaded certain people, who were leery or dismissive of Beaver Street because of its subject matter, to reconsider the book's merits.

Their thinking seems to be: If a scholar, in an academic paper, is describing Beaver Street as “thought provoking,” “vivid,” and “a rich account,” etc., perhaps it’s more than a dirty book. Perhaps it’s even a book worth reading.

But my favorite reaction to the essay comes from an old friend who plays a small but crucial role in Beaver Street. On page 146, he informs me that while I was incommunicado in the mountains of Idaho, trying to forget about what I did for a living, Traci Lords had confessed to being underage for her entire porno career.

Here’s what he said in his e-mail:

Congratulations, Bob. Not only is the analysis flattering, but you are now responsible for the first scholarly paper to refer to the “insertion of fifteen billiard balls into a man’s anus followed by an elbow-deep fist-fucking.”

I hope that no federal funding went to pay for this paper; you might end up being named in a tirade by Eric Cantor on the floor of Congress and will have to defend yourself in the presidential election.

To which I replied:

No need to worry about Cantor. The paper is a product of the British university system. Someone should alert the Queen. Read More 

Hey, Carl, Bob Rosen here. How've you been? I know it's been a while since you gave the order to fire me from High Society for "giving the magazine a bad name"--27 years to be exact. But no hard feelings, really. I was glad to be out of there, and you gave me some priceless material for Beaver Street. Thanks for that!

In any case, I’m writing to tell you about a Google search that brought somebody in India, of all places, to this blog a couple of days ago.

You can usually see where visitors to the site are located, and the search terms they used to find whatever they were looking for. Well, this particular query is a doozy.

Here it is, and it’s an exact quote:

“carl ruderman” fraud or launder or embezzle or crime or smuggle or ofac or judgment or jail or rico or terror or corruption or felony or trafficking or drugs or bribe or sanctions or extradite or subpoena or laundering

Wow! Talk about giving a magazine a bad name!

(OFAC, incidentally, is the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department. I had to look it up.)

So, Carl, enjoy your holiday weekend, and feel free to write anytime.

Yours truly,
Bob Rosen

PS—I’ll be sure to let you know when Beaver Street is being published in the US. If you come to the pub party, I’ll give you a free autographed book. You deserve one. Read More 

In Beaver Street I call Nixon, Meese, Keating, and Agnew (aka Dick, Ed, Chuck, and Spiro) the "Fab 4" disgraced anti-porn warriors of the 20th Century. But in writing about Texas governor, presidential candidate, and former porn monger Rick Perry the other day, it occurred to me that I should add to the group Alberto Gonzales, Bush's attorney general, a 21st century anti-porn warrior who resigned in disgrace before Congress could formally threaten to impeach him for lying under oath. So, with Al in tow, that would make the group the DC 5 (as in District of Columbia, not Dave Clark). But it's really hard to not include Perry himself in the group. Though not a declared anti-porn warrior, he is ignorant, misguided, and morally bankrupt—in short, everything a certain segment of the population is looking for in a president. And as a conservative, evangelical Republican who once invested in Movie Gallery, a video rental chain that specialized in hardcore pornography, that makes him hypocritical and sleazy, too. And it gives me license to call this supergroup The Sleazeball Six, which is both fitting and catchy.

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