Should be read as a meta-narrative.

Have a look at REGARDING PENELOPE, by my quondam thesis adviser at UGA, Dr. Nancy Felson. (NO THESIS! NO M.A.!) https://archive.org/details/regardingpenelop0000fels/page/n5/mode/2up The lens here is reader-response criticism, indeed, reader-response oriented performance. Dr. Felson has a keen eye for the POTENTIAL story-possibilities, and how they are avoided or actualized in the course of an actual performance. Homeric hero comes home. Has his wife been faithful? Will he be welcomed, or killed as a menace? In the case of Agamamnon, the wife has NOT been faithful, and the returning hero is killed. In the case of Odysseus, the wife HAS been faithful, and, eventually, Odysseus is recognized and welcomed home. My emphasis is not on the possibilities which ALREADY HAVE crystallized in a particular text, but rather to draw attention to the life-possibilities which HAVE NOT already crystallized for audience members, as they sit down to a play. Cybele and Attis is meant to give full expression to the feelings on both sides, the trans-regret and trans-ecstasy, and depotentiate them, so that a rational conversation can be had, without the emotion-driven need to run SCREAMING HEADLONG into the embrace of the Great Mother, as the trans-kids do, or to run SCREAMING AWAY from the Great Mother in all her forms, as Protestants do. ATTIS's fate is a FIXED THING, he never escapes. YOUR FATE -- and here I address Lial/Lila-mae, as a representative of the current generation of boys eaten up with father-hunger and anal masturbation-driven AGP fantasies of "being a woman like mother" -- is not yet a fixed thing, and could go either way. Similarly, Pindar Ol #1 was chosen because I really like laying before audiences the contrast between the two scenarios: Zeus / Ganymede (Boy grabbed by Great Father and never gets away) with Poseidon / Pelops (Boy grabbed by Great Father, but gets away and becomes husband & father.) Uwrote: "Only the god's nobility overcame his desire to keep Pelops for himself." What's coming into play here is not nobility, but Poseidon's inability to refuse the gift, which his beloved boy is claiming to require, in order to make the boy happy. I don't call this "nobility," but indulgence. Things seem work out well enough here, so we can't call this a fatal gift, a poisoned gift, a gift with strings, a gift given too soon or too late, a gift with too much power (Phaethon) or too little, etc. So, with only the information given in the poem, I have to call Poseidon's gift a blessing. A legitimate indulgence, rather than a toxic indulgence. The blanks in the story -- WHY does Pelops suddenly develop heterosexual interests? -- HOW does Attis in the first poem become Ganymede, and then become Pelops? Does Poseidon shed a few tears over his boy chasing POOOSY, or is he OK with it? -- are the point, as they are there for the audience to fill in. The need to offer a representation of FAILURE goes back to my experience in the mens' groups. If you are backed up by a Great Father/Great Mother figure, YOU WILL WIN. But you'll never be independent. If you have a go at life on your own terms, without supernatural support, you will inevitably taste failure. But the failure, and the eventual success will be REAL, and YOURS. A lot of dudes get hung up on the bitter emotionality of failure. When addressing the Ithacans, Telemachos does public-speaking from his first-person singular point of view, and fails spectacularly. the interests he puts forwards to the towns-folk are ONLY his own, not theirs, and so he fails to move them. Certainly I would LIKE to lay all of Homer, Iliad & Odyssey both, before my audience, at full length, rhapsodizing FOR WEEKS. But Opus Generis can only be ONE night's entertainment, and my aim was to balance extreme father-figure over-involvement (Zeus, Poseidon grabbing Ganymede, Pelops) with extreme father-figure under-involvement (Odysseus gone for 20 years.) In Felson's analysis, Telemachos must make his way between various possible plots: does he win the ax-contest and marry his mother, becoming Oidipous? Does he kill Penelope to avenge an unwelcomed Odysseus, and become Orestes? etc. The possible life-plots are the polysemy. Boys die either way, whether they're taken up into a relationship or not. This is called "growing-up," and you can read all about it in analyses of J. M. Barrie. The question for "Apollo" is whether the boy is re-born as an adult male, when his boyhood dies, or whether he over-identifies with his boy-hood, and dies when it dies. What's made clearer in the beginning of Daphne & Apollo, is that ALL Apollo's boys are dying IN ONE GO, in the bitter conversation Apollo has with Cupid. (That is, his interest in having relationships with them is dying, and they are themselves dying, because growing up.) Cupid (as we read later in the Phaedros) is ALL CUTIE BOYS IN ONE, and Apollo is trying to give out that he is TOO OLD TO PLAY WITH BOYS. This is Later Adolescence vaunting itself over Earlier Adolescence, and is funny ... because no sooner does Apollo brag about being grown up, than he is made to chase a little girl all over the school-yard, the Mighty Archer reduced to the status of a third grader. (No, this not "teaching rape," as the feminist harpies would have it. It's comedy.) So, in general, OPUS GENERIS is not the five poems taken individually. OPUS GENERIS is the meta-narrative of identity formation that each reader abstracts, for himself, from the five poems recited in sequence, by filling in the blanks with his own details. Attis-Ganymede-Pelops-Telemachos-Cyparissus-Cupid-Apollo being onecharacter, just as T. S. Eliot said about Tiresias in The Waste-Land. You've seen those wretched booklets they give to prisoners in sex-offender treatment programs, right? The programs they tend not to participate in? MY SEXUAL ABUSE HISTORY WORK-BOOK: Fill in the blanks: When I was ___ years of age, I was sexually abused by my _____. I felt like ____ and ____ about this event. (Attach additional pages for details.) OPUS GENERIS is the same thing, but at a higher level. Now, there are many other possible ways of laying out the same material, and I've mentioned Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle and Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway as two alternatives. But my gig is to recite classical poetry, and I have to aim my gigs at the areas of current interest. ================= T. S. Eliot, Notes to The Waste-Land. 218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: ‘...Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est Quam, quae contingit maribus,’ dixisse, ‘voluptas.’ Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat ultraque nota. Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae,’ Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore. =================================================================== The text of OPUS GENERIS is prettier if you read it with my illustrations, and all the languages: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/huxjisneg2m7ic9az4yzc/OPUS-GENERIS-1-23-2023-Broken-Tooth-I.docx?rlkey=sxmn1r8y4h18dkc3etf6nghl4&dl=0 As far as furries, now, I only stigmatize furries who AREN'T learning the lessons the furry experience has to teach them. Can you imagine a child so dull as to watch Pinocchio, and NOT GET IT, not get the didactic content, warning him about Pleasure Island? Well, that level of NOT GETTING IT is what they prioritize, is the atmosphere they actively try to create, at these conventions. So MANY coach-men in furry! (The coach-man being the evil figure abducting the boys to pleasure island, where they are turned into stupid donkeys.) It's the furry-convention people who are trying to RUN PLEASURE ISLAND that give me the creeps! Is it so very evil of me to want to openly troll the furry conventions by putting a "float" in the fur-suit parade, one fur-suiter dressed as a Greek boy, and another two got up in a pantomime horse costume as an over-dressed stag? Or indeed, to dress up AS THE COACHMAN, to mock the con-runners? The coach-man's proposition, from Pinocchio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDNzN2fv5bQ If that kind of pageantry is coming from ME, you would know the satirical thrust behind it. You would get it. You would know that I only refer to Cyparissus and Apollo IN THE LARGER CONTEXT of OPUS GENERIS, and to the end of trying to joke people out of their pedo-obsessions. You don't need to cry yourself to death, over a flower-boy growing up. (Say! Aren't we about due for some LIAL/LILA-MAE drama right about now? His most recent posts have presented us with the picture of a little teen-age drama-bomb about to go off! Another Nex Bendict, another Leelah Alcorn?) But the furries, no, they have no self-awareness, they would just continue to bark at me as an evil monster trying to import filthy pedo into their nice clean (!?!?!?) furry conventions. Well, let them dry-clean their own crusty fur-suits a few times, before they have a go at me. https://dogpatch.press/2023/03/20/mark-didaskalos-miner/ This review, by "Patchy Fur," makes no mention of the piece I brought, Apuleius / The Golden Ass, but instead is pure pedo-toileting. As a result, I'm including it in VIRTUE-CAST #6, both reading the review as written, and my account of what I saw going on around me at the con, no better or worse than any other con (!!!!), and what the con-goers MIGHT have gotten out of Apuleius, had they sat down and paid attention. ----Sb