Monday, February 10, 2014

Back at it

Well, my funk didn't last - whether it was long or too long is impossible to say.  Yesterday I began reading Catullus again.  In a long ago blog post in a blog I deleted during a previous Grand Funk, I noted that Catullus and Cohen were the two influences on my own work.  I listen now to Leonard Cohen's dark words in song, but Catullus!  I have not read Catullus since I found an unexpurgated copy in my High School library back in the late 1960s. I have always imagined (with no evidence whatsoever) that it was placed there by my Latin teacher, Mr. Whealen (called oh so wittily by my friends and I, Gaius). School officials in those repressed days probably thought it boring old Latin.

Here is one example:

I’ll fuck you and bugger you,

Aurelius the pathic, and sodomite Furius,

who thought you knew me from my verses,

since they’re erotic, not modest enough.

It suits the poet himself to be dutifully chaste,

his verses not necessarily so at all:

which, in short then, have wit and good taste

even if they’re erotic, not modest enough,

and as for that can incite to lust,

I don’t speak to boys, but to hairy ones

who can’t move their stiff loins.

You, who read all these thousand kisses,

you think I’m less of a man?

I’ll fuck you, and I’ll bugger you.


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