The Best American Poetry

Sex in the Stacks: Porn and the Librarian by Stephanie Brown

Ed. note:  Last month, in honor of National Librarian Week, we asked poet and librarian Stephanie Brown (Domestic Interior) to tell us about her discovery of an exciting sub-genre of pulp erotica.  In these sexcapades, the librarian is the object of admiration and fantasy. Stephanie happily obliged with the following roundup:

Twenty years ago, in my first job as a librarian, a man cornered me in the 800’s section and recited a fantasy that involved me, him, a red dress, and the race track. Little did I know that he was probably confusing me with one of the librarians who live on the pages of pulp erotica and porn novels.  Here are a few of my favorites, from the tame to the tempestuous:
 

“For four years Major Sam Griffin had stayed away from Serenity, Texas, gruffly avoiding the fact that he was still heartachingly [sic] in love with the woman who almost married his brother. Now home on leave, the devastatingly handsome pilot had to face the beautiful Emma Dalton again.” (The Major and the Librarian  by Nikki Benjamin).

We who work in public libraries know that Sam can just walk in and hang out all day bothering Emma. If she asks him to leave, he can claim his rights as a taxpayer so that he can watch her bend, stretch, and walk the floor in her form-fitting pencil-skirt, which she probably does, since afterall this is a Silhouette Romance. Perhaps Emma wants Sam to hang out all day.

While librarians are often portrayed as humorless neuters and rule-bound fussbudgets, we all know that  rule-bound women just love to rule their willing partners.  In the world of librarian porn, a sex maniac lives behind the lorgnette those orthopedic shoes: 

"The prim miss took off more than her mask of respectability behind the stacks...with any man who asked" (Nympho Librarian (right) by Les Tucker).  This milquetoast has certainly met his match with this black bra clad dominatrix. He’s tied up, but is he willing?

I think so! I hope library patrons who encountered them “behind the stacks” had a good look. 

Voyuerism in the library is a common theme in librarian-sex romps, and our librarian is just as likely to be the voyeur as she is the gazed-upon. She likes to watch her students go at it and it makes her hot, that’s what. Lots of voyeurs look at librarians too, masturbating by their open apartment windows, one of the many Rabelaisian adventures that happen to this gal. Take, for instance, Nick Eastwoods Naughty Voyeur Librarian, which begins "It was Karen Evans' first day on the job as head librarian of the exclusive Pinecrest School.":

  
 

And this:  “Though not quite a classic on a par with The Librarian Loves to Lick, and lacking the studied innocence of Horny Peeping Librarian, still, The Librarian's Naughty Habit (above right) is easily the finest account of sex and the circulation desk that we at the Ophelia Press can legally do.” 

Joan Crawford and I Share the Same Aries Birthday: A Bio-Bibliography (Part Two) [by Stephanie Brown]

Conversations with Crawford.  Oh my, what a delightful foray into high camp, which I now understood, at the age of my Saturn Return, full of education and experience, at my first professional job. Joan, interviewed late in life, answering questions with gusto, swearing, grinding out her cigarettes in an ashtray like the pugnacious broad that she was. Drunk and sentimental, she reminisced about the one that got away, Clark Gable. So sad! So sad that she could never keep a man! 

So delicious was this silly, freaky book; better yet were the dead-serious marginalia written by some earnest follower of Joan’s life and career. Mommie Dearest, the movie version starring Faye Dunaway, had been released: “No wire hangers!” we shouted at each other. The people I worked with understood the camp value of Joan: we loved Conversations with Crawford; we took turns describing the awful late-career movies we rented: Torch Song, Queen Bee, Johnny Guitar, Female on the Beach. There were other stars we pondered and talked about: Susan Hayward and Barbara Stanwyck, for instance, but nothing at all could ever match Conversations with Crawford, or those bizarre films. What an odd coincidence it was to find out that our head librarian was the daughter of Jean Rouverol, who had written the script for Autumn Leaves, where the very masculine late Joan has an affair with a boyish and dangerous Cliff Robertson.  

At my Saturn Return, I went to an astrologer. It was accurate, all of it, including how I would have trouble finding love, that the placement of Venus meant that I would have trouble with my femininity. I would have to learn to be more feminine, as in receptive and yielding and related. What sounded like horrible language to the equality-minded part of me (and probably to you, reading it) sounded true to the side of me that shared a birthday with Joan Crawford: it’s a lonely future you face when you find out that you can be castrating and critical, when you can clearly envision  living life as a lonely drunk, or in some version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, or when your perfectionism starts to drive you crazy, and when I looked into the abyss, this was the person who stared back at me.  

Over forty it’s a blur; I forget how old I am. I’m in a Laundromat. I haven’t been in one since my Saturn Return days. While I wait for my loads to finish, I watch Larry King Live on the TV above the dryers. His guest is Christina Crawford, and this is the 25th anniversary or some year anniversary of the publication of Mommie Dearest. Christina Crawford discusses the book’s impact, how people didn’t talk about child abuse back then. It’s a very different world now. Is anyone fooled by the star-making machinery nowadays?

I could define who I am in a completely different way, using other famous figures whose lives influenced mine, along with a better list of books and films that shaped my life. That list would flatter me, of course.  It’s suspect and embarrassing, yet also true, that I did make life decisions based on Joan’s cautionary tale, and this happened because I discovered that I shared a birthday with her.  I contemplated Joan Crawford’s example up to the time of my first Saturn Return, ages 28-30. At a Saturn Return we have to face ourselves and change what needs to be changed, or we risk staying in stasis, or moving backwards and making things worse. When I reached that age I felt compelled to change because I didn’t want to end up, like Joan, with the cleanest kitchen but the loneliest heart. 

-- Stephanie Brown

"Camp" [by Stephanie Brown]

When people ask—a get-to-know-the-new-kid work-conversation— “when’s your
         birthday?”
Sometimes I say, “March 23rd,”

And sometimes I say, “March 23rd,  the same day as Joan Crawford’s.”

Because that person may get the joke; we can
Dually recall:
Faye Dunaway sitting at one end of a table
Pepsi businessmen leaning elbows on the table
Listening in fear and irritation
And her eyebrows and her perfect Joan lips
Because she says, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas!”
It’s a laugh-out-loud moment when she says that—
And sometimes I muse aloud to the person who asked me for my birth date:

If we share the same birthday, do I share the same qualities with Joan?

If that person got all this.  Maybe like
Joan, I’m the kind who winks when she says shit.

So I suppose when I say,

“March 23rd, the same day as Joan Crawford’s,”

I am testing that person to see if that person can detect
This, too:  don’t fuck with me, fellas.  It’s true.

-- Stephanie Brown

Joan Crawford and I Share the Same Aries Birthday: A Bio-Bibliography (Part One) [by Stephanie Brown]

Joan Crawford, whom I’d seen in films like Strange Cargo with Clark Gable, sleek, slender, slinky young Joan:  How beautiful she was! I knew that Garbo and Dietrich were considered superior movie star beauties (and they were in the book too), but Joan captivated me. I especially loved a close up of her face, its lashes heavy enough to create shadows, her eyebrows plucked and arched above her heavy lids (her Aries eyebrow glyph, but I didn’t know that then) and her round cheekbones. I loved the way she wore a gown and held herself like a statue:  proud, hard, clean.

At my job at the public library I noticed that lots of people checked out My Way of Life by Joan Crawford; I shelved it often. Its photos, with back-lighting and cheesecloth over the lens, show Joan as an older woman, with huge lips and eyebrows, a severe upswept hairdo and a dead look in her eyes. This was not the Joan of my star photography book; this was the Joan of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Trog. Sneaking a peek before I put it back on the shelf, I read bits and pieces of her life philosophy which discussed moisturized hands and a clean house. A photo had her mopping her dark spotless kitchen floor.

Mommie Dearest was a shocking story of a drunk, a harridan who punished others for her personal dissatisfactions. As I recall there were debates about its veracity; Joan had her defenders and loyalists and her detractors. It seemed true and believable to me. In my late teens and early twenties my friends and I started to read about astrology in things like Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. We would read those canned descriptions of the sun sign and its attributes and of the famous people who shared one’s sign — my friends shared theirs with, say, Grace Kelly or Gloria Steinem, while I was left with Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Doris Day: Aries women, described as childish, masculine, and bossy. Even worse, I found out that I shared my exact birthday, March 23, with the now infamous Mommie Dearest. 

Our shared birthday became a joke and a ribbing and a dig among my friends. We took up an interest in Joan and her weirdness. Over time we read Joan Crawford: A Biography; we read Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Star; we perused Joan Crawford: Jazz Baby, The Films of Joan Crawford, Crawford’s Men. I discovered that she had camp value, as did Bette Davis (and Doris Day, for that matter). I didn’t quite understand how to define camp, but wanted to know. I read Bette Davis’ This ‘n’ That, I read Doris Day: Her Own Story. 

Bette Davis met her match with Gary Merrill in real life and in All About Eve, but the marriage, I read, did not last, nor did Joan’s love affair with Clark Gable. I found both of these men really appealing, so these facts made me sad. I saw that they had ended their lives alone. This was the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and I was taking in feminist thought from the world around me, mostly by osmosis, and making up the rest. Like most Aries women, I was a strong, fearless, and directed person. I didn’t particularly need feminism, if you will. I also fit the worst descriptions of an Aries woman. I was oblivious, brash, and selfish. I was a drinker and a carouser—I had my own campy qualities, but did not realize it yet. I was able to dominate men in a way that made me hate them for it and made me miserable. It seemed to me that this was Joan’s problem, too, along with her anger and her perfectionism.

-- Stephanie Brown

Stephanie Brown in "Ploughshares"

<< In the raw data of a census, you can see who lived next door to whom, their households with grandchildren, lodgers, slaves; how they are marked as illiterate, what language their parents spoke, how they lived in close density to one another in a Northeastern city, or were among the very few people in a town, named for an animal, on a prairie. The Statistical Abstract of the United States is an historical compilation of census data. In its tables you can see the large trends in our society over time--how people marry or don't, what they die from, how they go to school. We are all something like and unlike the societal changes that we see in statistics. Here is our history.>>

Stephanie Brown, whose poems have appeared in BAP and on this site, and who recently offered an astrological reading of Grace Kelly's career, comments on her poems (such as "The Census: 2010") in the new Ploughshares. Take a look!

Grace Kelly: Born to Be Aphrodite [by Stephanie Brown]

              Born on this day in 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly, iconic American star and Princess of Monaco, remains the ne plus ultra of the beautiful woman, exuding an effortless femininity, grace, charm, and self-confidence.  With her regal mien, she became a princess in real life by marrying Prince Rainer of the Principality of Monaco in 1956.  Her stuff-of-fantasy royal wedding foreshadowed Diana Spencer’s thirty years later.

             She exited Hollywood sans scandal, married well, and seemed to make no backward glances to that career or toward her ambitious lower-upper class Irish-Norwegian-American Catholic family from Philadelphia. She devoted herself to her life in Monaco as princess, mother of three children, charity maven, and fixture in the pages of Paris Match, until her violent death in an automobile accident at age 52. 

Princess Grace left Hollywood on a high note, getting out before she had a chance to see her career falter, avoiding the clichés of grim determination seen in steely stars like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, the boring domesticity of other fifties stars such as June Allyson, or the tragic fate of a love goddess like Marilyn Monroe.  While Kelly won an Oscar for her portrayal as the wife in The Country Girl in 1954 (a controversial choice as she was up against Judy Garland for A Star is Born), her star rose higher in retrospect in tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s.  She appeared in three of his films: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief in 1955. 

Kelly ispresumed to have been Hitch's favorite actress, the archetypal “cool blonde” of his obsession. Donald Spotto (The Dark Side of Genius) reads Vertigo as a key to both Hitchcock’s personality and his obsession with Kelly; the actresses that he employed after her, such as Kim Novak in Vertigo, were rebound-romances for Hitchcock — he replaced her with lookalikes in an attempt to replace his beloved.

Hitchcock’s genius was to reveal the shadows in the iconic images of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. (She and Grant are a match of amoral schemers in To Catch a Thief.)  Often noted is his reveal of Grace Kelly’s sexuality from under the surface of her cool, proper, glamorous, and even slightly forbidding exterior in both Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  Yet, as noted in many Hollywood tell-all books (such as Oleg Cassini’s), Kelly was noted for being a very sexual woman, reportedly having affairs with William Holden, Oleg Cassini, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and others. 

"The Alcoholic and the Ball and Chain" [by Stephanie Brown]

The Alcoholic and the Ball and Chain

He takes her on a date — a “date,” a “surprise!” —
But nothing’s planned.
It’s just another requirement, like passing a written exam.

Another night with the wife.
He doesn’t even know what to write
So there’s no card. An unwrapped box — here — this’s for you.

What she wanted.

Did she get what she wanted?
This is the way she looks at life — so he calls her a child
When they fight.
He’s putting in his time with her —
Before the bottle of beer (her disapproval, her smirk)
And the bong hit (out of work).

-- Stephanie Brown

From Domestic Interior by Stephanie Brown (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). The poem originally appeared in American Poetry Review.

 

"A Dear Devoted Husband" [by Stephanie Brown]

A Dear Devoted Husband

Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man — wow — I love how
The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes
Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning
His hip to the right, kind of messy
Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle
And a hip cocked in the same direction, yes, indeed, they were firmly
Planted in their hips; they were
A little greasy but it’s faded out in the black-and-white reproduction
And you can’t smell what it must have smelled like, not like
Today the way the world tries to smell like 18th century France
Though that was just a cover-up really for bad odors after
Too much gray-haired-we-are-all-the-same-age palace rutting;
I’ve looked up this photo because for a good month you have been reading
Grant’s Memoirs and reading me things from the volume though
That is a habit of yours I don’t like at all I don’t like
When you read me things out loud: you make me stop what I’m doing!
But you had to interrupt and tell me how you found out that Ulysses’
Pet name for Julia, his wife, was, “Pupie”
Which may sound something like the name we gave each other — “Poopie”
           is how
I spell it on e-mails or how I imagine it spelled when I say it out loud
And like me, Julia had strabismus in her right eye.
Okay, so, even though Grant is sexy and saved a nation, you are more sexy
Than that: your forearms especially are nice, and you will never get
So portly that no one remembers how gorgeous you were once;
You will never be president, but that’s all right too.
And when you read me things out loud, I sometimes listen, I do.

-- Stephanie Brown

"The Caretaker" [by Stephanie Brown]

The Caretaker

Hatred is what a kid knows.
There is no understanding of how the life
Created the monster, who thwacks
Her bottom, each day;
Who ridicules the girl
And her pathetic attempts at a bathing suit.
Who sighs, shakes head, purses mouth, pissed, opens purse.
And then,
When the girl makes her very rational case, brave little attorney,
This makes the monster unleash
A new kind of articulate and sneer for which
The girl is not prepared. The girl
Can’t win against a slap or against the words:
Tears are pathetic excuses, there is no excuse, she has tried
Too hard and the girl is impossible and
Too sensitive to boot, oh there are so many illustrative
And air-tight examples! This
Is not how the monster wants to spend her life, either,
Taking care of a monster!

-- Stephanie Brown

"Manipulating the Husband" [by Stephanie Brown]

Manipulating the Husband

The husband behaved badly.
I am the bringer of shame, I am cross.
Yes, he will toss in the sheets while I sleep, and snore, soundly.
Oh yes.
I will not forgive easily, but I
Am incredibly polite.

Now things get difficult.
The husband’s guilt, welling up behind the dyke
which the little Dutch boy is holding behind the wall
with one finger,

Will burst. You’ll see.
I am the keeper of many things, including
Secret crushes on Halle Berry and the teenage girl
across the street;

I will cook a dinner even though I work
Much too much to support this family; I will

Make it taste like courtship again and tonight,
In the sheets, I make sure he wins.

-- Stephanie Brown