A few weeks later, I realized what I'd actually seen: the verbatim transcription of one or more tapes dictated either while masturbating or else while making love to someone, describing either a man's sexual fantasies -- the voice was clearly male -- or his actual experiences (or both). Which is to say, a literary first, using the technology of the tape recorder in an unprecedented way. William Burroughs would have been proud of this author. James Joyce too. Not to mention Carl Jung. Libidinal stream-of-consciousness, direct from the right brain. What a brilliant innovation!

I got back to that bookstore as soon as I could . . . but the book had vanished. Or I couldn't recognize it. Of course, having dismissed it so quickly as insignificant, I hadn't bothered to note its title, or, if I had, I'd promptly forgotten it. Should anyone reading this post know of it, I'd like to hear from you. And I'd love to find a copy of that book; I now view it in an entirely different light, as a neglected experiment in erotic prose -- a pioneering effort and, quite possibly, a lost masterpiece.

This reminiscence is evoked by reading in a recent issue of MacWorld about the possibility of using iListen, a speech-recognition program, in conjunction with a digital tape recorder, to generate text files from recorded dictation. (A good example, by the way, of how anything can lead you to think about sex, if you're so inclined.) You see, I've often wondered about that anonymous writer's methodology. I assumed that he didn't dictate with a live stenographer in the room while jerking off or fucking someone, or dictate to a stenographer while making love to her. That is, I assume he used a tape recorder to register his words.

The question of who did the transcribing thereof then arises, inevitably. His secretary? Unless that's who he was fucking, this seems unlikely. Someone in his business's secretarial pool? Also doubtful -- way too risky. He himself? Possible, but in that case wouldn't he at least clean up the punctuation a bit? Some outsource service? This seems probable -- but it would have to have been someone he could trust, which would mean a freelancer . . .

Odds are I'll never know, but the concept intrigues me. And other questions come up as well: What made him think of this? Was he on deadline for a manuscript, and had to generate something fast, and had run out of ideas, and turned on his tape recorder in desperation? Did his publisher understand what this mss. represented, how it had been generated? Did the publisher (or his editor) question its literary style? Or did the editor at that house just check to see that it contained the requisite four-letter words and hard-core scenes and put it into the pipeline untouched? What did readers think of it? How many people bought it? Did he produce other works in this style?

Whether or not I ever learn the answers, I find all of this rewarding to contemplate. And inspiring. I'm going to look at iListen, and digital recorders, in a whole new way. Maybe I'll even give the combination a whirl myself. After all, here's an approach to the creation of erotic prose about which one can responsibly say, Do try this at home.