Hi Prof, Emma Bovary here. Stuck in rural provinces a hundred miles north of the city. Will be sprung to Carroll Gardens for a few days next week -- solo, catsitting for former neighbors. I would love some male companionship... and you sound wonderful... I'm a poetic writer myself -- age 52, full-figured (size 14/16), attractive. Perhaps you wouldn't mind tutoring a Wellesley grad who needs a refresher course --- well, in something or other? Belle

Okay, we'll see how that goes. It was good for a laugh. He's 46. Probably when he means he's dying to teach again, he means someone younger, not 'Continuing Ed.' But it did cause me -- oh these very circumlocutory ways to discovering poems -- to look up a reference -- the crack in the tea-cup opens -- the phrase he requested be placed in the subject line, so as to show that I am not "a bit of spam." Who says "a bit of" -- only -- I daresay -- a Brit. (And who says "I daresay"? Only someone who read too much Henry James at an impressionable age, and whose Polish parents spoke English with a British-inflicted -- no, I mean, inflected -- accent -- which caused my grade school mates to look at me askance with great wonder as we introduced ourselves first days of kindergarten and subsequent grades -- what are you from England or something? I was so screwed up as a kid!

Ah, but darling -- fortunately, ever so fortunately -- that was ages and ages ago, and now I have it all figured out, and everything's fine. I'm right on top of it all -- well, no, not quite, not in the way I'd like, which definitely played a role in my sweet session this morning. I have taken -- now that it's summery -- to ritually closing all the upstairs windows and also the door to the juliet balcony -- so that I might -- as though it were the dead of winter -- make all the noise, or whatever noise, I might possibly want to. And then I start downloading a youp*rn (usually disappointing, lately). It takes forever with dialup - yes, that is still our mode, one of my very many absolutely excruciating frustrations - I mean, why should I waste my time, suffer through a disappointing 'not right for me' youp*rn when, if I could just somehow get at them quicker, there is no reason among the possibly millions of recorded encounters - I would find the one that does it for me, for real? I have found that as much as I might enjoy, really revel, in a particularly good one (oh veex-en, as he clambers up the settee and she milks him from beneath, looking like a trollope in a Hammer film, the quality of the footage slightly grainy, and the furnishings in that color film, weirdly cheesy, bookcase filled with colored spines, the Empire-style settee...) -- I never wish to see it ever again, not twice -- I find that I am very restless, that way.

Right now, my book written by a different Prof, is, as it happens, sitting on top of the Fifty Shades of Gray, book --- suggestively. I'm about halfway through both. And honestly I'd completely forgotten about the latter, I find it so lame. Well - perhaps because, however solo, I've managed to craft an actual sex life for myself -- its frustrations aren't a result of lack of orgasm -- and amazing orgasm at that. Which makes me wonder -- because it takes me a while, even by myself -- and you have no idea how frenzied my imaginings are, riffling through image after image, scenario after scenario, cast of characters even, gender-switching, positions -- OMG -- like a card shark, riffling this way and that through my deck, my cache - mental cache - of cards... and then somehow -- ah finally, the one key that unlocks the door (cue up Nicole Kidman in The Others) -- and there I am, my mind (plus battery-operated highly targeted vibration) having taken my body -- as if through one of those Star-Trek portals -- into a completely different place, of involuntary vocalizations, and clear, unmistakeable -- the moment it hits, it's just - well, that's it -- it takes me forever to get there, with all sorts of machinations -- but then it's --

beyond my control, seismic. It's the most extraordinary feeling (duh!). I mean think of it -- so many of our bodily experiences are beyond our control -- I mean, I don't really, have a sense of how my digestive system works, for example, there's a lot that happens -- well, certainly without my willing it to happen.

So to have so much power, in a way, over one's body, and really be able to hit an involuntary ecstatic state -- I can hardly believe it.

And then I spring up, feeling very satisfied and gratified (because it's very frustrating for me, the many moments before, in which I feel so distracted, by all sorts of things - weak batteries, so I change them out; maybe someone replied to a message; what's fresh as to blog-stats? oh, now she's giving him a bj (at 1:17) when at (0:47) he was inside her -- oh, and is everyone, in these new times, all shaved down there, because I'm not, and I've heard of the term Brazilian, but = well, no, I don't shave, and not only because I've just had solo sex (if any) in recent years, but -- well, I'm going to lose it eventually anyway, so why rush it - I don't know, I sort of like hair!

Plus, I grew up on reading The Joy of Sex, sneak-peeks reading it, the volume on the night-table of the couple whose kids I babysat for many Saturday nights, c. 1975. It didn't phase me in the least that the man and the woman, in graphite-drawn oddly chaste embrace, had "pubes" -- the fact that she didn't shave her armpits -- for this fourteen-year old, then -- oh, eeeeew!

What do you think darling -- do you think I'm done? Ah, rolling over in bed. It was good for me. I hope it was good for you. If not, there's tons and tons -- here, take the remote, or the mouse, or maus, whatever.

Okay I'm done. Rolling over in bed, getting up, with my great big tall stiletto heels (oh, so that's what they're for - to grab onto - got it!). In the past I'd had a cigarette. Instead, now I'm hungry. What's for dinner? Oh good, cheese ravioletti, on a bed of garlic-sauteed kale, sprinkled with parmesan cheese. Oh good, I'm glad -- well, I'm glad it's all there, ready to go, on the stove downstairs...

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.