"W. Kiernan" wrote:
>
> The
> point I was hoping to make was that neither Tropic of Cancer nor Ulysses
> are rightly judged by their value as stiffeners, that's all.
>
We had a long debate sometime in the last year or two over the history of pornography. It seemed difficult for a number of list members to grasp that "pornography" in the sense Bill uses it here is a historical phenonmenon. The same mistake is being made here. Molly Bloom's chapter is certainly wonderful, but it would be lousy pornography. I've not read Miller except for the quotations in Millet's book. The passages she quoted were pretty silly -- but (leaving aside their value or non-value as porn) they were well written. Miller himself claimed his books weren't porn because they were comic, and he denied that anyone could get an erection while laughing.
Carrol