James Joyce's filthy letters to his wife Nora (Very NSFW!! language)

Again - these are not safe for work! The texts below may be a century old, but some of them are sexually explicit even by contemporary standards. They are intended for adults only. If discussion of sexual matters is likely to offend you or get you into serious trouble with your employer, your spouse, your religion or your government then you should leave this page now.

While editing a post for Bloomsday* (June 16 ) (wiki), I ran across James Joyce's notes to his wife (and muse), Nora Barnacle, from his Letters. Excerpts below, and more at Paris Review:

“My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

James and Nora and their children in 1924.
Clockwise from top left – James Joyce,
 Giorgio Joyce, Nora Barnacle, Lucia Joyce

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.”

"My sweet naughty girl

I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms around my neck in shame and shit it down softly. The sound will madden me and when I pull up your dress.

No use continuing! You can guess why!"

~ James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce.

Ulysses fan, or just a fan of hanging out in an Irish pub? June 16 is Bloomsday - here's my favorite quote from Joyce's obscenity trial:

“[i]n respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”

The Worst (And Most Important) Smuggling Job in the History of Literature: the publisher went to a LOT of trouble to force an obscenity trial.

James Joyce's Love Letters to Nora Barnacle, His "Dirty Little Fuckbird"

More at Adoxoblog.

Prayers to stop a dog from barking

You have some ability, I suppose, to make your own dogs behave, but for the neighbors' noisy dogs, you can try this. From Magic Songs of the West Finns, Vol. 2, by John Abercromby, [1898] (online version), here are a couple of prayers to silence a dog.

This one prays for a mushroom in one nostril and an apple in the other:

Field maiden, farmyard girl! O golden king of earth, here where they need thee, come from the field with thy family to close the mouth of a dog, to plug the nozzle of a whelp. Bind silk across its eyes, tie a bandage round its ears, a mushroom up one nostril thrust, an apple up the other one, lest it should scent the breath of man, perceive the smell of a full-grown man, lest it should hear a passer-by, lest it should see a wanderer.

If that doesn't work, you can pray for a good, old-fashioned muzzle:

O Hiisi [v. Juutas], shut the dog's mouth up, Lempo [v. Perkele], the jawbone of the dog, fetch, Hiisi, thy tall hat, Lempo, thy broad-brimmed cap with which to stop the puppy's nose, to bung its 'scenting-channel' up. Place a bar before its mouth, a gag between its teeth, between its tongue-strings lay a check, so that it cannot ope its jaws, nor separate its teeth. If that is not enough, take the backmost hedge-stake of the field, the lowest railing of the fence to stop the mouth of the hunting-dog, to press with it the puppy's head, so that it can no more give tongue at any man that passes by.

Good luck!

Friday links

Magna Carta was signed on June 15, 1215: history, quotes, Horrible Histories and Monty Python explanations. Related, Mark Steyn's The Field Where Liberty Was Sown, on re-learning those lessons.

How did nuts and bananas come to mean “crazy”?

Secret Rooms Inside The World’s Most Famous Landmarks.

For Father's Day, a selection of parenting advice from Homer Simpson: “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try". Related: here are some Father's Day lessons from Walter White, Don Draper and Tywin Lannister, and one of my favorite Dad stories (NSFW- language).

How the West Was Wired: before telephone company wiring was ubiquitous, isolated Great Plains farmers used barbed-wire fences to transmit telephone calls. 

Before Camping Got Wimpy: Roughing It With the Victorians.

ICYMI, Tuesday's links are here, and include how to email a cat, Anne Frank's birthday (including a video tour of the annex where her family hid for two years prior to their arrest), weeding fields with flamethrowers, and that time the U.S. Postal Service tried delivering mail by missile.

Magna Carta was signed on June 15, 1215: history, quotes, and Monty Python's explanation

The Magna Carta (wiki), the basis of the thesis that leaders are not above the law, the beginning of the path from absolute monarchy to the rule of law, and an important foundation of our Anglo-Saxon liberties, was signed on June 15, 1215. 

The British Library has produced two illustrated videos on it, narrated by Monty Python's Terry Jones - see below. First, a couple of quotes:

Nullus ballivus ponat decetero aliquem ad legem simplici loquela sua, sine testibus fidelibus ad hoc inductis.

~Magna Carta, clause 38

(In future, no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.) 

Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut dissaisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exulietur, aut aliquo modo destruator, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittermus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorem vel per legem terrae.

~Ibid., clause 39

(No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.) 

Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut differemus, rectum aut justitiam.

~Ibid., clause 40

(To no man will we sell, deny, or delay right or justice.) 

The Magna Carta (wiki) (the "Great Charter") was signed by England's King John at Runnymede, south of London. John, the youngest son of Henry II, reigned from 1199 to 1216 and aroused fierce opposition in both the nobility and the church for his high-handed authoritarianism. 

The resulting bloodless rebellion ended when John - under compulsion - signed the Great Charter, drafted in Latin by the British clergy, that guaranteed both baronial and ecclesiastical rights and privileges and the customs of the towns.* Of course, as soon as the barons left London, John renounced the document and then appealed to Pope Innocent II, who technically still ruled England. The Pope declared the Magna Carta null and void. It was modified, re-issued and reaffirmed a handful of times until the final version of 1225**, and is now considered the most important document of English constitutional history. Four contemporaneous copies remain extant in England.*** 

A few clauses of the Magna Carta became part of the American government: Clause 39 (quoted above), or habeas corpus, provides that arrests and trials of citizens must have merit and is found in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Clause 61, which called for a committee of barons to oversee the king's actions, inspired the "checks and balances" system.

Of Magna Carta, Winston Churchill (wiki) wrote in his History of the English Speaking Peoples,

"The underlying idea of the sovereignty of law, long existent in feudal custom, was raised by it into a doctrine for the national State. And when in subsequent ages, the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights and liberties of the subject, it is to this doctrine that appeal has again and again been made, and never, as yet, without success."

* N.B. To get a flavor of some of the other clauses, consider these: 

1. The English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.

13. The City of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs. 

30. No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent. 

The original - click here to embiggen

54. No one shall be arrested or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman for the death of anyone except her husband. 

** Cato has an good synopsis of the revision process: Getting King John To Sign Magna Carta Was Only Half The Battle

*** Originally, a large number of copies were made for the barons and for distribution among the English counties. Of these "first editions," four survive. One is on display at the Houses of Parliament, one is in the British Library, and one is in a cathedral in Salisbury, England. The fourth copy is usually housed at Lincoln Cathedral in Lincolnshire, but is occasionally loaned out.

The British Library explanation of Magna Carta, narrated by Monty Python's Terry Jones:

Another in the same series:

Horrible Histories: find out how Magna Carta came to be in the Horrible Histories 800 years Song:

Neatorama has a reprint of a good article from Uncle Johns's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader on the history of Magna Carta.

Related, Mark Steyn's The Field Where Liberty Was Sown, on re-learning those lessons.

Parts of the text above are based on Ed's Quotation of the Day, only available via email - leave your email address in the comments if you'd like to be added to his list. Ed is the author of Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 and Hunters and Killers: Volume 2: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1943.

Tuesday links

It's Anne Frank's birthday: here's some history and a video tour of the annex where her family hid for two years prior to their arrest.

That Time the U.S. Postal Service Tried Delivering Mail By Missile.

How to email a cat: a bit of pneumatic tube history.

Organic Farmers Are Using Flamethrowers to Weed Their Fields.

A Kentucky State Police trooper, a retired State Police colonel and a county coroner have been accused of several crimes including transporting moonshine and eyeballs.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include why the military still uses Windows XP, how Merv Griffin came up with the Jeopardy! format, the anniversary of the Democratic Filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, and Japanese balloon bombs of World War 2.