"Flesh-and-blood women can never be sublime," I remember her scolding. "Not even girls you meet at CBGBs. To find a sublime woman, we must go to the classic tragedies of Racine such as Phaedra and Iphigenia." Ah, those old tropes about hysterical women, incest and slaughter. Mothersill was probably right in theory, but then she had never seen Karen Finley perform.

Finley is sublime. Finley is terrifying the way Rainer Maria Rilke writes "every angel is terrifying." For 25 years, she has been performing -- usually beginning or ending up naked onstage, hollering a self-penned blue tirade dotted with scatological grunts, a verbal eruption given while Finley smears her naked self with chocolate syrup or other foodstuffs, such as the mashed yams she once stuffed in the cleft of her buttocks while mooning the audience ("Yams Up My Granny's Ass"). (For the brave, other foods smeared on, in or across her naked body include ice cream sandwiches/kidney beans ("Mr. Hirsh"); chocolate syrup ("A Different Kind of Intimacy" and "Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman"); and honey ("Shut Up & Love Me"). She has also painted invisible black velvet paintings using her breast milk as the artistic medium.)

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I didn't care about that later garbage, of course. It's Salter's prose that is priceless. What I could learn from Salter's discards, his edits! Salter is a "frotteur" -- French for someone who "rubs words in his hand" so he can find the best phrase. In America, Salter has always been under-appreciated (outside of the rarefied air of the late George Plimpton's Paris Review, which, despite its name, was published from uptown Manhattan). In Paris itself, Salter is considered an American treasure. French journalists assume Americans feel even stronger about the man. Salter's wife, playwright Kay Eldredge, has forbade her husband from correcting their impression.

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I believe we can authoritatively state that the baby boom itself began during June of 1946, the month when "The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care," by Benjamin Spock, first went on sale for 35 cents. This date dictates that the oldest official member of the baby boom is 59 years old. The youngest is in his or her early 40s. Only now has one of these boomers dared to chart the course of modern middle age -- the novelist/biographer/critic/publisher James Atlas. His semi-memoir is titled "My Life in the Middle Ages." The cover does not show a robust man swatting a tennis racket, or a wavy-gray-haired fellow nuzzling a blonde half his age, tossing away his bottle of Viagra over his shoulder. No, the cover shows a heavy-set man with a gray, receding hairline lying down on a brick street.

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The pair of Nova books that stand out immediately are "The Good Son" (1982) and "The Congressman's Daughter" (1986). They both concern American politics and wealthy families. "The Good Son" is about a young WWII fighter pilot, born to a first-generation millionaire. The book begins: "My father is a coarse, charming man, a lawyer, and a good one, and when I was flying over the desert and the German pursuit pilot began pouring round after round into my plane (a P-40), I was thinking of how I learned to drive, and how it affected my father."

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I remember Natalie as slight and lilting and freckled with long curly red hair and small granny glasses that made her look like a precocious 7-year-old. I had moved to Manhattan before her in May. She wrote me a letter saying that she planned to move into a cousin's vacant East Village apartment come autumn. I suggested Natalie come a few months earlier and share my one-room apartment in Little Italy. She did.

Natalie and I were not "lovers." We were deep friends first who also shared sex  that act usually happening after a session of criticizing each other's poems. It was as if we were trying to reinvent Greenwich Village bohemia, like Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in "Reds." One week Natalie left for a poetry workshop on Cape Cod, and afterward announced in an excited voice that she had slept with the main act at the workshop, poet Saloir Kallington (not his real name). I was envious, but not jealous. Not a bit. I too wanted the opportunity to have sex with a famous poet.

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It all began when Citizen Flynt was born in Magoffin County, Ky., in 1942, to poor white trash parents. Pop Flynt was a drunk, and young Larry and his mom soon fled without him to Indiana when the lad was just 10. When Larry turned 15, he fibbed his way into the Army. The kid's age was discovered and he was discharged after a year. Larry then joined the Navy. He served on the USS Enterprise when it was an aircraft carrier and even met JFK when the president was inspecting America's armada.

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In a Salon interview last week, Weinstein tried to spin the Academy Award nominations as an overall win for Miramax ("City of God" was a surprise nominee in several categories). But the fact remains that Weinstein's big-budget baby "Cold Mountain" was not a nominee for best picture. Or best director. Or best actress. It only got a shot at best actor (for Jude Law), and best Zellweger (uh, sorry, I mean best supporting actress), and some "minor" technical awards like cinematography and editing, not to mention original song and original score (and as we all know, Harvey can't sing).

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Then just before World War II, a biologist living in the middle of Indiana -- a guy who studied wasps (of all things!) -- conducted a university-funded survey of American sexuality that discovered that Americans did it all the time! He published half of his findings in 1948 with "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." Alfred Kinsey had discovered that American men did it in bed, in parked cars, in the kitchen, and even out behind the barn.

A typical American man, say, Fred Astaire, did Ginger while standing up, lying upside down, and even back-to-back like a pair of wayward missionaries. Kinsey even discovered that sometimes Fred did it by himself. Although Fred seldom did it to dead people or children or animals, he probably experimented at least once or twice with another guy, say, Gene Kelly.

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The celebrator is a trim, elegant, immaculately tailored man in his mid-50s. We meet inside an armory on the Upper West Side of New York where an art sale is being held. We sit, sipping Merlot and comparing the sights of beautiful women walking to and fro with the photographs of beautiful women in his book. I turn to a page at random -- Audrey Hepburn leaning out the window of a black limousine is on a page opposite a woman curled up in darkness, revealing only her naked hips, shoulders and braided dark hair.

Do you own all these photographs?

I do. It's a sickness. This book is the result of my disease.

And you love women?

And I love women. They are so much more interesting than men. So much more complex.

Present company excluded.

Present company excluded. There are a few sensitive, decent men in the world. But you don't really want to hang out with [most men] too much. Too much aggression. How did you come across the book? You were strolling by your local Barnes & Noble?

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"Emotions" -- ha! The best parts of his book detail the proliferation and complications of cybersex. We spoke to the professor by phone from Haifa. But before you begin reading, let's you and I have a little erotic experience. Slip off your pants or skirt. Go on, do it. If you're sitting in an office, do it subtly so no one sees. Now pull down your underwear, but don't take it off. No. Leave it stretched between your knees. Feel your bare ass on your seat. The byline on this article says David Bowman. Maybe that's my real name. Maybe it isn't. Maybe my name is Donna. If you are straight or gay, male or female, my name now fits into your cosmology. Before you begin reading, say one of these names out loud: "David Bowman." "Donna Bowman."

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Consider Talking Heads. Led by art school dropout David Byrne, and manned by Army brats Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, as well as Harvard architectural graduate Jerry Harrison, Talking Heads' repertoire included everything from edgy love songs about Washington bureaucracy to African-influenced techno chants that could turn one's ears into savannas and jungles. Although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards started out as art students like Tina and Chris, the Rolling Stones never wrote a song called "Artists Only" that began with the line "I'm painting again!"

Talking Heads were born of the punk movement, but with their Brady Bunch haircuts and Lacoste shirts, they were obviously not of that brood. The band was also present at the birth of rock videos, yet they transcended the limits of MTV lip-sync fodder, instead producing videos that were the rock 'n' roll equivalent of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealistic masterpiece "L'Age d'Or." Then there was David Byrne's "big suit." Byrne, normally the hipster generation's answer to Mister Rogers, would lumber onstage wearing a white suit padded to the size of a sumo wrestler, then sing, "Who took the money? Who took the money away?"

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So how did Cleopatra, more dog than woman, seduce the most powerful man in the world?

"She used her brains to seduce," Prioleau says, sitting in my New York kitchen. Prioleau is an attractive woman -- probably around Cybill Shepherd's age. She's dressed in an elegant black skirt and dark hose, and has nice gams. She talks with a slight Southern accent. Most important, Prioleau likes dogs. My English pointer, Snoot, lies at her feet.

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Thea is also British, born in 1979. She began recording her own songs in 1995, when she was just 16. This teenager was no Britney, singing about puppy love and navel rings. Instead, she wrote lyrics like some delinquent Sylvia Plath: "I am like a bitch in heat"; "You fucked your way in, you can fuck your way out"; "You tattooed my image on the lips of all your friends/ As some tight cunt to fuck and leave and fuck again ..." Yet her sound wasn't punk. Gilmore's first records were produced with that guitar/keyboard ethereal Brian Eno-begat-Daniel Lanois-begat-Malcolm Burn high-tech whoosh sound (think Emmylou Harris' last few albums), the kid's lyrics sound elegantly dangerous, not juvenile -- the difference between a spotty girl with a Mohawk lugging an axe vs. a Hitchcock cool blonde in a evening gown hiding a razor between her legs.

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Every generation gets its own version of history, whether it's about Civil War battles or the making of the atom bomb or the invention of the striptease. Historian Jessica Glasscock has written a postfeminist history of bump and grind, "Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight." Smartly written and marvelously illustrated, Glasscock charts the stripper's progress from the original Victorian "Venus in Fur" Pauline Markham to America's foremost peeler Gypsy Rose Lee to "the World Famous *BOB*," a modern stripper who stands on stage agitating a martini shaker with her breasts.

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My wife looks up from her knitting. On the phone, I hear a male voice in the background. Hubby is coming. We hang up.

I wish I had a chance to tell her why I feel this book is such a hoot. Sure, Kipnis proclaims that love is a "sacred cow" and she is the "butcher." And what's really on her chopping block is marriage, or any relationship that demands sexual and emotional fidelity. Of course, the roads that lead from monogamy are all named Libido Street. The libido is endlessly hungry for variety -- its cravings no secret to Kim Cattrall's character Samantha in "Sex and the City," or any American boy two years into puberty. Guys spend their lives dealing with it. Most women are surprised, then deal with it, too.

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She was born Norma Louise Kuzma and took her last name from Jack Lord, star of "Hawaii Five-O." Lords was never a choir girl, but she now holds herself like a woman from a more innocent time. Maybe a young silent movie star -- Mary Pickford crossed with Lillian Gish. Traci teases the shutterbugs by holding her new memoir, "Underneath It All," over her mouth and peering at her attackers with impish eyes. She knows the camera loves her. In publicity photos Traci Lords always appears as a radiant woman. She's too beautiful to care about her notorious past.

Almost.

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But that's Coulter as a political creature. What about Coulter as a woman? For years this 40-something woman has worked so hard to become the she-god of the Republican zeitgeist that she's forsaken any personal life. She has no marriage or long-time partner -- her social life consists of sporadic dating. We should worry that she is dooming herself to spinsterhood, rather than assume Coulter practices free love or is still in the closet. Such speculations would be cruel.

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Then she photographed how the maid hosed each girl down.

Don't think I'm taking Ellen's word for any of this. I have seen the pictures. You can too. They're in a book. In the old days, one would have had to slide into some fake "rare" book store, and sneak out with this volume wrapped in brown paper on loan for 50 bucks a week. But these are modern times. You can buy this book at Borders and place it on your coffee table. Your guests will be free to page through it. No one will get arrested. No one will think bad thoughts about you. Not even when they turn to Page 75 -- Eric the chauffeur has "lured the girls into captivity." He ties one to an "old flogging post." Later, the wicked baroness -- of course a "wicked baroness" is involved -- chains one of those coy mademoiselles to a radiator. It would be a shame if the distressed girl soiled her underpants. Later still, the Baroness' maid flogs a rich man's daughter in the pony stable -- the pony himself not particularly curious as the hieroglyphs of pain are raised on the poor girl's rump, welts which will later be referred to in the book's slight text as "fiery Braille."

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Eighty-three-year-old Henry Miller read "Fear of Flying" as well. He believed a woman had finally written the female equivalent of "Tropic of Cancer." A number of men younger than Miller also read Jong's novel, many figuring that it would provide a crackerjack method of getting laid. Apparently chicks wanted a "zipless fuck" -- or as Jong explained: "Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."

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So Jaybird claimed it was a hippie nudist magazine. And it was, since in a Republican nudist magazine, you'd probably see photos of naked men and women playing volleyball or digging up crabgrass. In Jaybird, a hippie dude would blow his girl's pussy like a kazoo while another flower child flashed her pudendum -- and anus too -- giggling madly below a poster of John Wayne.

Taschen has just reprinted the best of Jaybird in one trilingual edition (English/German/French), compiled by the legendary dirty magazine editor -- of Outlaw Biker, Juggs and Leg Show -- Dian Hanson. Salon spoke with her by phone.

How did you get involved with this project?

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