Sex is very much the flavour of the month in literary circles, it seems.

Our own Mr Olaf Tyaransen has just launched his new book, Sex Lines – Adventures In The Erotic Underground (Hotpress) and a grand little effort it is too, though perhaps, some might say, not quite as compellingly readable as my own literary outing of some 23 years ago called, coincidentally enough, Sex Lines – Adventures In The Erotic Underground (Red Hotpress).

In a book that has everything you could possibly want from a book – pages, a front and back cover, the whole lot – young Olaf writes with an engaging wide-eyed charm about watching an underground porn movie being made, serving in a sex shop, investigating brides for sale in the Ukraine and so on and so forth.

Here too, we find uncanny echoes of my own book, now almost a quarter of a century old, which also featured articles on the porn industry, sex shops and marriages-to-order (a particularly memorable piece of investigative journalism entitled ‘I Suppose A Bride Is Out Of The Question?’).

Profoundly Erotic

Yet, in one crucial sense, the books are very different. For example, where Olaf watches a porn movie, I produced, directed and starred in one (the profoundly erotic Whip Some Skull On Me, Bitch, winner of the Golden Beaver Award in Ontario in 1972); where Olaf serves in a sex shop, I actually owned one (Shelf Pleasure in Ladbroke Grove, busted by the fuzz, 1971, ’72 and ’73); and where Olaf turned a little bit chicken in Kiev, by finally declining to bag a bride, I had to charter an aircraft to bring home one hundred and three East European lovelies, 5,000 litres of vodka and a couple of Lada to stash away for the day that I knew would surely come when Bono finally discovered irony.

While Olaf’s book will doubtless serve the useful purpose of sending readers back to check out my own groundbreaking work in the field – much as, say, a younger, more innocent generation might be led to the original Sun Sessions through an encounter with Shakin’ Stevens – the same can not be said of the other hot tome of the moment, The Sexual Life Of Catherine M.

The intimate autobiography of French art critic Catherine Millet, this controversial work has proved a sensation in her own country and arrives in these parts trailing critical raves and claims that it is “the most sexually explicit book ever written by a woman”.

Which may be so, but considering that the opposition includes Maeve Binchy and Alice Taylor, this hardly amounts to a ringing seal of approval.

For sure, Catherine gets through an impressive amount of fucking and sucking with friends and strangers and partners male and female, and she is refreshingly free of the crippling Catholic guilt which causes so many of our own literary titans to go bald and grow beards – and they’re just the women. And yet there is, as it were, a huge hole which remains unfilled in her catalogue of incessant poontangery.

An’ ah thank the ladeez know jest what ahm a-talkin’ bout.

Humping Arena

Of course, there’s a very good reason why Catherine M never got the chance to enter the humping arena with Sam S. – Mistah Snort, he don’t do art critics.

It’s nothing personal, y’understand, just that I can’t abide the bastards. They’ve fucked up the language, for a start. A “room” is not good enough for these dingbats; no, it has to be a “space”. Last time I went to an exhibition, I made a point of asking in a loud voice if I could hang up my coat in the cloakspace before announcing that I needed to take a piss in the bathspace. Needless to say, I was promptly shown the exit – which is just as well since it was hard to tell it apart from most of the exhibits.

So, if it’s bad enough knowing that these waterbrains are out there in their black polonecks and NHS specs, how much worse would it be to wake up next to one of a morning and be thanked profusely for “your inspiring installation”.

No, language is all-important, and never more so than when it comes to describing the act of leurve. So while I wish Olaf and Catherine all the best, I warn prospective readers that in neither book will you find such well-turned and evocative phrases as “third-leg boogie”, “coiling trouser-snake”, “pulsating poontang”, “glistening porksword”, “gobbling like a turkey on speed”, “sweet purty apples ripe for the plucking” and the imperishable “get down woman and when you’ve gotten up scramble me some eggs”.

And that’s just from a recent letter I wrote to the Irish Times about the sale of the Irish games to Sky.

Nope, they don’t write ’em like that anymore. And you’d have to wonder why.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq