I just… had to share this. I’m reading a compendium of short stories by my favorite author, Ray Bradbury. A lot of it is heart-rending and thought-provoking, some of it is the expected Martiany goodness, and then… Well, then there’s Junior.
Junior is the charming tale of an 84 year old man who wakes up one morning with a giant boner. I mean really, just a tremendous hard-on. He is so excited about this he calls up a trio of former lovers who of course rush right over to take in the spectacle.
It is described thus:
"For there, starring in the last act of Revelations, was Albert Beam the Second. Or perhaps, justifiably proud, Junior! Unseen in years, he was an orchard of beauty and sweet Eden’s Garden, all to himself. Was he both Apple AND Snake? He was!
Scenes from Krakatoa, the Explosion that Rocked the World teemed through the ladies’ sugar-plum minds. Lines like “Only God Can Make a Tree” leaped forth from old poems. Cora seemed to recall the score from Last Days of Pompeii, Elizabeth the music from Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Emilly suddenly shocked back into 1927, babbled the inane word to “Lucky Lindy… Spirit of St. Louis, high, stay aloft… we’re with you…!”
Well the old ladies can’t handle themselves and everybody gets so excited, they uh, wear themselves out. And then Albert Beam goes back to bed.
The metaphors are hilarious but I am a little bowled over to see it coming from Bradbury of all writers. But admittedly, nobody else could have written it that charming and funny and bittersweet.
Well, I remember being surprised at My Uncle Oswald from Roald Dahl. Ha! When I looked it up to link it, I see that it seems to be subtitled “Expect the Unexpected”.
Lately? I don’t know, but your post brought up a song released by Rachel Bloom more than a decade ago called “%#@! Me, Ray Bradbury.” It’s not so much the vulgarity that surprised be but that the subject matter was Ray Bradbury as written by a woman in her 20s. Bradbury was still alive and apparently got a kick out of the video.
My love for him is platonic, but I get it. He’s influenced my own writing style more than anyone else I can name.
I love Rachel Bloom and when I watched Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (a masterpiece) I kept waiting for that song to show up. Didn’t realize it was not written for the show.
A few years ago, there was an anime on Netflix called Carole And Tuesday. It’s about two girls who form a band (on a future Terraformed Mars), and so several episodes revolve around talent shows and feature a lot of different music.
And the thing about this show is that it’s rather gentle and warmhearted, seemingly made for all ages—there’s not really much violence, sex or profanity. So it comes completely out of left field when an act called the Mermaid Sisters takes the stage and drops this little gem (NSFW): [Carole & Tuesday] Mermaid Sisters Song - YouTube
I’d recommend just watching it cold, but I’ll describe it for those who might not be in a position to fire up YouTube to watch an NSFW video:
The song is a jazzy a capella number, nicely performed, whose lyrics consist entirely of strong profanity.
p.s. Going back exactly 50 years, there’s always Styx with their classic novelty tune, “The Plexiglass Toilet Choir”, a song people generally do not believe exists until they hear it, and possibly not even then.
I watched that video and thought… Someone just needs to sit in the back seat while I drive on a long road trip, and they could have had the lyrics to that song.
As to the original subject, I read a lot of Piers Anthony as a child. He mostly wrote books appropriate for young adults. Then there was the book Pornucopia. I think the description from Amazon explains it well enough.
Pornucopia is a picaresque black comedy that transgresses all bounds of everyday good taste. It begins in a near-future world where sex-vending machines and genital transplants are taken for granted. Prior Gross, the hero and sex object of this wild adventure, thinks his fantasies have all come true when a beautiful young woman seduces him on a public beach. She turns out to be a succubus, beginning his initiation into a realm populated by demons that are not merely horned, but horny. He encounters a perverse cast of characters that includes a satyr, a vampire, and a pair of luscious sisters, one of whom tricks him out of his manhood. So Prior Gross sets out on a perverse odyssey, taking him to a distant planet where he discovers the key to the return of his property and, ultimately, the origin of the universe itself.
Also, as I grew older, I’ve realized his books are kind of crappy. (Okay, really crappy.) But that was probably the worst out of any I’d read.
Oh, and I learned today that decades later he wrote a sequel book called The Magic Fart. I wish I made that up. WTF Piers, you goddamn weirdo.
Night of the Living Dead. The ending was entirely unexpected, and continues to bother me.
Our Hero, who has taken charge of panicky people, calmed them down, done his best to help the party survive, dealt with kids trying to kill their mother, fended off zombies in close quarters, and otherwise been heroic, is shot and killed by police performing a mop-up operation. WTF?
Well, not lately, and I couldn’t read the poems since they no longer exist. But evidently Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote some pretty steamy erotic poetry. Yes, Charge of the Light Brigade, In Memoriam, Locksley Hall Tennyson apparently could be pretty risque. The person whose writing told me about this claimed that he wrote it to get away from “the saccharine verses of the Idylls of the King” But, alas, he burned them all, or had them burned, before he died so that they would affect his posthum-ous memory.
It kind of makes me sad that writing about sex is not considered serious or is something a writer feels they would have to hide. I mean it’s a part of life and the point of writing is to explore life, it doesn’t make sense to leave this one part out. This attitude persists to this day. I’m just thinking of all the romance novels written with pen names.
ETA: Lately was just a filler word. It doesn’t have to be lately.
BTW, I was curious about where the mostly hidden dinosaurs in the background were from, and it’s actually one of several sculptures at a place called Borrego Springs:
