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Mo: Thank you, Jillian, for that fascinating, uh, transsexual version of the Oedipus legend, "Oedipal Complex."
--
#194, "Limelight" (1994), collected in Unnatural DTWOF (1995)

 

Alison Bechdel

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A few years ago, a motion picture version appeared of Sophocles' immortal tragedy "Oedipus Rex". This picture played only in the so-called art theaters, and it was not a financial success. And I maintain that the reason it was not a financial success... you're way ahead of me... was that it did not have a title tune which the people could hum, and which would make them actually eager to attend this particular...flick. So, I've attempted to supply this, and here then is the prospective title song from "Oedipus Rex".

 

Tom Lehrer

 

So be sweet and kind to mother/
Now and then, have a chat!/
Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand-new hat/
But maybe you best let it go at that!/
Or you may find yourself with a quite complex/
...Com-plex!/
...and.../
You may end up like Oedipus/
I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus!/
Than end up like poor Oedipus Rex!

 

Tom Lehrer

 

"But do you really think I'm any good?" a nervous Stephen Spender asked WH Auden, some six weeks after they'd met. "Of course," Auden said. "Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated." Humiliation was Spender's lifetime companion. Few poets have been more savagely reviewed. And none has nurtured a greater sense of inadequacy. This is the man who, having dismissed John Lehmann as a potential lover because he was a "failed version of myself", adds: "but I also regarded myself as a failed version of myself." With Spender, self-deprecation reaches comic extremes of self-abasement.

 

Stephen Spender

 

On the bus going home I heard a most fascinating conversation between an old man and woman. "What a thing, though," the old woman said. "You'd hardly credit it." "She's always made a fuss of the whole family, but never me," the old man said. "Does she have a fire when the young people go to see her?" "Fire?" "She won't get people seeing her without warmth." "I know why she's doing it. Don't think I don't," the old man said. "My sister she said to me, 'I wish I had your easy life.' Now that upset me. I was upset by the way she phrased herself. 'Don't talk to me like that,' I said. 'I've only got to get on the phone and ring a certain number,' I said, 'to have you stopped.'" "Yes," the old woman said, "And you can, can't you?" "Were they always the same?" she said. "When you was a child? Can you throw yourself back? How was they years ago?" "The same," the old man said. "Wicked, isn't it?" the old woman said. "Take care, now" she said, as the old man left her. He didn't say a word but got off the bus looking disgruntled.

 

Joe Orton

 

There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex,
You may have heard about his odd complex.
His name appears in Freud's index
'Cause he loved his mother.

 

Tom Lehrer