Wednesday, August 08, 2007

a dose of Leyner

For those of you unfamiliar with the wild prose of Mark Leyner, I hereby provide a warm sample. The following excerpt is from Leyner's 1995 Tooth Imprints on a Corndog, a compendium of shorts (plays, stories, articles, and scattered poetry). I'm quoting a passage from the beginning of the chapter titled "The Good Seed."

An aficionado of body fluids in general, I've been particularly interested in sperm ever since reading, as a youth, a Dear Abby column which described the quasi-immaculate fertilization of a girl who was impregnated by swimming in a pool into which some libidinally incontinent teen had just ejaculated. (One can imagine the clustered school of sperm, tails whipping the water into a froth, advancing toward the hapless girl's bikini crotch to that menacing musical leitmotif from Jaws.)

As the years passed, I grew to personally identify with sperm-- the bullet-shaped head packed with genetic data, the midsection full of energy, the long posterior flagellum; forging with almost suicidal determination into channels of cervical mucus. I suppose I've always seen myself as, basically, a head brimming with information, an energetic midsection and a propulsive tail; delving intrepidly into the remotest regions of womandom. And I think that it's been these very spermatozoan qualities that have appealed to my girlfriends and wives over the years. I don't know... perhaps there's a special ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny allure to guys who emulate the plucky gamete.


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