Quasirandom: Blog

The Romans had filthy minds, to put it mildly, and the people of medieval Europe had earthy senses of humor.

As a fan of smut, I’ve always been fond of medieval fabliaux -- short bawdy tales, typically in verse, popular throughout western Europe in the high middle ages. The genre started in France but spread to Germany and Italy, and Chaucer’s pilgrims also tell a few. As did Boccaccio. My medieval Italian is for shite, but his Decameron’s in prose and modern translations do fine for a pony. So for a lark, I once versified its smuttiest story, just to make it look more like a fabliau. And then forgot about it.

(The Decameron is quite topical, BTW: a party of aristocrats quarantine together for ten days (in their case, from the Black Plague) and tell each other stories to keep themselves amused. Sound familiar?)

Speaking of languages, I’m a serial language learner. Twenty or so years ago, I picked Latin as my next, just because. For better or worse, I have a habit, when I get to the point where I’m starting to read independently, of using poetry as practice texts -- to make it interesting. Sometimes, I translate poems that strike my fancy. For Latin, I mostly read Ovid, Catullus, and Martial, but I didn’t translate them much -- I mean, they’re popular for a reason, but that means they’ve been done so many times over the centuries. The smutty epigrams from the Priapea, however, caught my eye. Great stuff, and all but unknown. I translated about two dozen, all told, versifying half -- and forgot about them, too.

I’ve recently been going through my old files, seeing whether anything was worth revising or at least revisiting, and found both of these. As far as the priapic poems, the eight I posted were the best of the lot, or at least were the ones I’m not embarrassed to show in public. Alibech’s Service needed a little polish, mostly for voice, but otherwise was decent journeywork. And since the content of both fit SOL, here they are. I hope you enjoy them.

This came up in the comments to Together and Apart, but just for the record:

Demi is an expy (along with her parents) of a character from aroslav’s The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins. I didn’t use Desi herself because I needed my version to do something out of character for the original. So instead, Teri meets a cosplayer with a suspicious similarity to her inspiration.

While I’m on T&A, I should mention that I fixed the borked formatting of Mike’s sonnet, in chapters 11 and 18. And yes, it is a strict sonnet, with iambic pentameter and strict rhymes. He could use a little time away from e.e. cummings, though.

And while I’m on administrivia, I finally got around to creating a Hanging Out universe, with the two stories (so far) set in and around the club, They and They and Tangled Up, Halfway Between You Both.

And that's a wrap for Teri Florez and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Fucking Bad D/a/y/ Week -- and all I have for the triad, for now. I'm not ruling out further stories (especially since, near the end of the first draft, all three of them got squirrelly and instead of, yanno, trying to get out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into, started telling me what happens when Teri and Dana join Mike at UT-Austin) but first I need to reset my brain with something completely different. Something, maybe, more smutty. And weird. Weird-ass smut sounds good right now.

(Yeah, I should have realized that separating the three would mean long stretches of no sex. As would upping teh dramaz. My bad. I'll try to make their hypothetical next installment a sex comedy. Writin' to me strengths, and all that.)

True fact: I am almost exactly the same age as Alexander Viorst, and grew up a handful of blocks from his house.

Never met him, though -- different schools, different circles. My parents did once meet his mother, author Judith Viorst, at a cocktail party. I read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day as a kid, but didn't imprint on it the way I did The Monster at the End of This Book or Richard Scarry's Great Big Air Book -- and I certainly didn't know that he and his older brothers were real.

I love love LOVE reading that book aloud to littles, though. The cadences are just about perfect and the author never tries to redeem or minimize Alexander's experience. Some days are just bad, even in Australia. The sequels (which I didn't learn existed till I was a grownup) are okay, but none are as good as Very Bad Day.

A short shameful confession: I once gave Peter S. Beagle a silver origami unicorn at a comicon.

I didn't introduce myself at his booth, though, but rather pounced-and-escaped as he passed by my table in the author alley. I am, in person, as shy as Teri, though I cope differently. I spent more time folding paper, that con, than I did selling books.

(I'm assuming you all have, in fact, read The Last Unicorn and so know why this is a big deal. If you haven't, why are you wasting time on SOL instead of rectifying this crucial omission from your life experience already? Like, RIGHT FUCKING NOW?)