For those of you who have a sense of humor, you might want to pick up Marty Beckerman's e-book, The Heming Way, whose subtitle is "How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!" In the book, we follow Papa's rules for living, and are goaded on to rally against the soft, doughy, neutered American male of our times.
By the time of the second letter – dated 1946 and addressed to Gallimard, two world wars and a changed world later – Claudel had broken irrevocably with Gide over his sexual orientation (legend has it that the Catholic Claudel once speared a banana fritter and exclaimed, "this is how Gide will burn in hell").
The attitude of sexual tolerance (according to legend, Strachey was the first mortal to utter aloud the word "semen" in mixed company) only added to the fun; there were several "open marriages," and bisexuality seems to have been a Bloomsbury specialty.
According to mythologist Pattanaik, Mohini is just a disguise to delude the demon Bhasmasura, rather than a sexual transformation in this legend.
This was later the grist for his great, picaresque novel, "Soul Mountain" (Flamingo, $24.95)—where the narrator travels through a land of shamans, old popular legends and sexual bliss.
It's the work of a serial killer picking on wealthy, discontented women and suspicion, including that of White's wife (Cathy Moriarty), falls on White, an edgy, troubled outsider fascinated by black holes, Apache legends and sexual ambiguity.
In the area of sexual relations, Uncle Eddie's legend preceded him: when his wife threatened to leave him, he reportedly nailed all her clothes to the floor.
Shelley's dreamlike language and sensuous imagery made him one of the favorite poets of the prudish Victorian age, once his sexual radicalism had receded into legend.
So, on the third occasion, he tipped off the Met that he was going to pose as a blind beggar selling French ticklers from a tray bearing the legend, "Purveyour of Sexual Aids to the Gentry, 1st July, 1977".
Digital technology and social media have made it easier to reinforce a sexual double standard where boys are legends and girls are sluts for enjoying the same things.
Disregarding social opinion, its adherents, using the natural (sahaja, "born with") qualities of the senses and stressing the sexual symbolism of Bengal Vaishnavism, reinterpreted the Radha-Krishna legend and sought for the perpetual experience of divine joy.
