AK: Mmm hmm.

DE: Well, if you’re going to engage in virtual sex, what do you do? You write the story! You put it in language. There’s an enormous amount of sexuality, of connections, happening on the Internet. We’re getting a much higher quality of erotic writing than we used to see, because people are doing it now, people are practicing talking about these things.

AK: Definitely. So I recently read Pauline Reage’s The Story of O, and loved it. Do you have any favorite erotic novels, favorite authors of erotica?

DE: Very little. First of all, I just plain don’t rely on any form of porn, aside from my own fantasies, and that’s just who I am, that’s not a statement about porn or erotic fiction. I do love The Story of O, it’s definitely a favorite. I like really, really good graphic artists. The best of whom are either no longer working, because you can’t make any money at it, like Michael Manning, or dead, like Guido Crepax. You can see in the drawings, you can see who’s actually been able to observe people. I like very high level art for my porn. I was in London recently, in the British Museum, they had a show of Japanese erotic art, Shunga, which has been so suppressed in European culture. In Japan, from about 1240 to about the middle of the nineteenth century, all major artists were openly expected to devote twenty percent of their work to explicit erotic art, which included genitals, and more covertly on after that. I’m looking right now at a print of Hokusai’s “The Fisherman’s Wife,” which shows a very ecstatic woman being made love to by two octopi.

AK: That’s really interesting, very different from, you know, the way Western society works, where no one would ever be encouraged by the institution to include sexual art in their work.