Free The Naughty Bits by Jack Murnighan Page B

pond.
    When my Balzac, now, strides forth with upright phallus in his fist, from behind he must be read as a giant lingam marching to India. I mean these burly semblances to stun, my Lord, as when, for Becque and sundry appreciative madams, I turn actor and behead with a sword the plaster statues arranged in front of me. Those who cry out, in abuse, “Rodin is a great big prick” are right. I am always and ever the policeman’s son, neither peasant nor poet.
    I receive on Sundays, as my copy of The Guide to the Pleasures of Paris says, married to that carthorse, Rose, who gave me a son with a broken brain, abandoned by Camille, who once adored me and now in the asylum murmurs, “So this is what I get for all I did.” At least she, unlike my Yankee heiress Claire, fat and daubed and drunk, never kept leaving the dinner table to go and throw up, as now, or play her creaky gramophone while my public sits around me, hearing me tell them yet again that it was indeed I who stove in Isadora Duncan, pommeling that little ear-like hole between her lively legs, and it was also I who, like the milkman delivering, brought her weekly orgasm to little sad Gwen John in her rented room. I snapped her like a wineglass stem, but made her coo all the same.
    When I get Upstairs, His Nibs and I are going to go on such a masterful rampage the angels will cry to be raped, neuter as they are, and none shall contain us, we shall be so massive in our roistering, from the hand-gallop to the common swyve, with our hump-backed fists banged deep into the soft clay of eternity.

from The Theogony
     
    HESIOD
    So let’s imagine you’re thinking of writing a book. What are you going to write about? Your family perhaps, your quirky friends, some ex-lover who wronged you (after having righted you so nicely), the day-to-day living tips you learned from your cat? Or maybe you’re an ex-lawyer, ex– navy SEAL, ex–secret agent, or ex–medical examiner whose insider information will drive a nail-biter narrative. But how about this as a topic for your first book? The origin of the gods and the history of the world. Nice modest project, no? But that’s what Hesiod, an eighth century B.C. contemporary of Homer, opted for as the subject of his first book, the Theogony —no small proof of how much Western literature has changed in the last twenty-eight hundred years.
    Now Hesiod probably didn’t invent all his material (much of it he could have taken from oral legends passed down or from written sources that predate him), but it’s still great to imagine him trying to pitch it to a Hollywood producer: “Well, Mr. Coppola, it’s kind of this classic tale of birth and rebirth, of gods being created out of nothingness or out of the side of each other’s heads, of sons castrating their fathers and genitals floating on the sea and turning into goddesses, that kind of thing.” Francis Ford would probably look him deep in the eye, put his hand on his shoulder and say, “Best lay off that crack pipe, son.”
    But although much of the Theogony is decidedly distant to the modern sensibility, the one thing it shares with much modern literature, sadly, is its leaning toward misogyny. In a book that otherwise makes almost no reference to normal human reality, Hesiod pauses long enough to take some gratuitous potshots at our mothers, wives, and sisters. Women are the curse Zeus inflicted on mankind because his son Iapetos stole fire and brought it to us, and apparently we haven’t been forgiven.
    Yet among the gods at least, it’s not the females who cause trouble but the fathers and sons. Iapetos stole the fire from Zeus. Zeus, meanwhile, vanquished his father, Kronos, who had eaten all of his other children. And Kronos, as we will see in the following excerpt, also had a father to fear and, with the help of his mother, took matters into his own hands. Centuries before Sophocles and millennia before Freud, Oedipal myths were in full force, nowhere more clearly