February 21
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell's Birthday

The advent of social media has made diarying somewhat of a lost art. Diaries were once an important subset of literary forms, and some of our more famous diarists include John Adams, Louisa May Alcott, John Cheever. Kurt Cobain, André Gide, Frida Kahlo,
Lincoln Kirstein, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Joe Orton, Samuel Pepys, Ned Rorem, and Virginia Wolfe. But the diarist that had the greatest impact on feminism was Anaïs Nin. Her sexually explicit diaries span several decades and provide a remarkable insight into her personal life and relationships, especially her sexual relationships with Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Otto Rank, Antonin Artaud, James Agee, James Leo Herlihy, and Lawrence Durrell which reflected her intellectu and physical passion for writers.

Anaïs started her diaries when she was 11 years in 1914 and continued writing until her death in 1977. Due to its size of of her diaries that consisted of 1,000 typewritten pages in some 150 volumes in 1966, she would not find a publisher until 1966, when the first volume of her diary would be published, covering the years 1931–1934. Six more volumes of her diary would follow. Anaïs once explained that she had begun her first diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.

Her remarkable insights were due in part to her studies of psychoanalysis with Otto Rank and her practice as a lay therapist in New York. She was a patient of Carl Jung for a time as well. In the early seventies, she was quoted by every major feminists with her classic psychological insights into relationships, such as

	Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
	Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
	Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
	Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings

Her fame as a diarist also created interest in her her erotic literature and short stories. A great deal of her erotic writings including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously. Anais appeared in the three films Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and Bells of Atlantis (1952). She was also portrayed by Maria de Medeiros in Henry & June (1990) based on her novel Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin. But since Anaïs is now more remembered for her erotic writings, and appropriate choice to celebrate her birthday is the classy Erotica Cocktail which we suggest pairing with Henry & June/

Erotica Cocktail

ingredients
1 oz gin 4 oz champagne	0.25 oz lemon juice 2 tsp sugar

Instructions

1. Fill a collins glass almost full of ice cubes.
2. Pour all ingredients into glass.
3. Stir well, garnish with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry, and serve.