15. James Joyce could not get enough of farts
James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, combined complexity with explicit content that shocked contemporaries and led to landmark legal decisions on obscenity. He was also a total pervert, who had a thing for farts: he loved them to distraction, and could not get enough of them. Whether dishing them out, preferably on people’s faces, or receiving them, farts made Joyce’s day. Being a writer, he had to dive into farts, and there is an entire collection of Joyce letters in which he writes passionately about farts and farting.
In one such letter, he wrote: “It is wonderful to f*** a farting woman when every f*** 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“.
