Nin, Anaïs

Nin (nên, nîn), Anaïs
1903-1977
French-born American writer and diarist known for her novels, including Winter of Artifice (1939), and The Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931-1966 (published 1966-1980).

Orgasm

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), Franco-American novelist, diarist. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 2 (1967), entry for Oct. 1937.

I thought I was the quickest the quickest the quickest mind alive and the quickest with words but words cannot catch up with these changes, these changes are beyond words, beyond words,  beyond words. While I repeated these words I felt the waves of pleasure like those of the most acute pleasure of lovemaking . . .    I felt the impossibility to tell the secret of life because the secret of life was metamorphosis, transmutation, and it happened too quickly, too subtly.

  - Anais Nin

• 604 track _Just Another Transmutational Process_ MP3 (vK) by Lumukanda off of _Banteer_ on Psy Harmonics #036

After taking LSD in Oscar Janiger's office, the writer Anais Nin developed  her own theory about the drug's effect on the creative impulse. She  later incorporated her rough notes, which Janiger has saved in his  plenary files, into an essay included in The Diary of Anais Nin. "I   could find correlations [to the LSD imagery] all through my writing,"  she wrote, "find the sources of the images in past dreams, in reading,  in memories of travel, in actual experience, such as the one I had  once in Paris when I was so exalted by life that I felt I was not  touching the ground, I felt I was sliding a few inches away from the  sidewalk. Therefore, I felt, the chemical did not reveal an unknown  world. What it did was to shut out the quotidian world as an  interference and leave you alone with your dreams and fantasies and  memories. In this way it made it easier to gain access to the  subconscious life." 

• appeared in avant garde short film _Ritual In Transfigured Time_ (vhs/ntsc) (1946) by Maya Deren
• appeared in avant garde short film _Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome_ (vhs/ntsc) by Kenneth Anger
• The first all-electronic soundtrack was for Anais Nin's _The Bells of Atlantis_ in 1952
• close friend of Marjorie Cameron

Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French author who became famous for her self-published diaries, which span a period of forty years, beginning when she was twelve years old.

Born in Neuilly, France, after her parents separated, her mother moved to New York City with her and her two brothers. While still a teenager, Nin abandoned formal schooling and began working as a model. In 1923, she married Hugh Parker Guiler and the following year they moved to Paris, France where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing, working with people such as D.H. Lawrence.

She is also appreciated for her erotica. She was the first woman to really explore the realm. Before her, erotica written by women was virtually (vide, e.g. Kate Chopin) unheard of.

Nin was a friend of many leading literary figures, including Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, and Lawrence Durrell.

In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. She died of cancer in Los Angeles, California on January 14, 1977, her body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Monica Bay.

List of works

* D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
* Collages
* Winter of Artifice
* Under a Glass Bell
* House of Incest
* Delta of Venus
* Little Birds
* Cities of the Interior, in five volumes:
o Ladders to Fire
o Children of the Albatross
o The Four-Chambered Heart
o A Spy in the House of Love
o Seduction of the Minotaur
* The Diary of Anaïs Nin

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