The Stupid School

The world is full of BS artists trying to wring spondulix out of the honest inspirations of others. Many a jerkoff has sat at the feet of a master for a moment and gone away to claim inheritance of a practice or a wisdom they could never attain in a million years. What's the answer? Wikipedia!

More anon.

The serpent sings. This is my heart as I travel all over: my spirit, my life and my living. Those who have entered in can hear. And those who have eyes can see. In the seeing is the seen. In the hearing, the heard.

- text by Paul Hogan
- original art from a mural by Paul Hogan and Stephanie Johnston

From a Review of
THE ANATOMY LESSON
by JUDITH THURMAN
New York Review of Books 2003-12-08

In 1525, Antonio Vignali, a young Sienese nobleman, founded a
lofty-minded humanist society that he called, with boyish irreverence,
the Academy of the Stunned (Accademia degli Intronati). The
commandments of its motto—"Pray, Study, Rejoice, Harm No One, Believe
No One"—were honored selectively. The Intronati were an élite cenacle
of scholars who shared a devotion to vernacular literature; passionate
republicanism tempered by contempt for the common man; flamboyant
misogyny qualified by awe for women's supposedly insatiable sexual
appetites; hatred of clerical hypocrisy; youthful Weltschmerz; and a
fervor for sodomy that, at least in Vignali's case, bordered on the
evangelical. The academy convened on Sundays, behind closed doors, to
discuss philosophy, music, law, poetry, and language, and to critique
its members' work. It appears that quite a bit of member exercise took
place also, as is the case at all frat parties, however exalted. The
Intronati made a specialty of scandalous theatrical productions (one
of their several affinities with the fin-de-siècle Decadents who
orbited Oscar Wilde and the coteries that formed around d'Annunzio,
Artaud, and Cocteau). Nevertheless, or perhaps therefore, they
acquired an illustrious reputation that they still enjoy. Their most
famous collaborative effort was "Gl'Ingannati" ("The Deceived"), a
comedy with a cross-dressing heroine that influenced Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night."

Sometime between 1525 and 1527, Vignali wrote a radically obscene
satire on politics and sex that he called "La Cazzaria." The sixteenth
century was a golden age of the outré, particularly in France and
Italy, and this slight opus, the length of a novella, took the form of
a mock-Platonic, mock-scholastic dialogue narrated mostly by
disembodied genitals. The manuscript was intended for private
circulation among like-minded freethinkers, but someone—friend or foe,
it isn't clear—pirated a copy and had it printed without the author's
consent, crippling Vignali with a notoriety that he didn't outlive. He
went into exile a few years later and published nothing else in his
lifetime.

Centuries passed, and "La Cazzaria" was more or less forgotten, though
a few copies were conserved in the dirty-book archives of various
august institutions and in the collections of libertine bibliophiles.
One was unearthed about ten years ago in a Spanish house that was
being demolished. Two sixteenth-century editions found their way to
the Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—a restricted room
legendary among French schoolboys (and the object, in fantasy, of more
midnight break-ins than the vault at Fort Knox). Another copy settled
into the bowels of the Vatican, and a nineteenth-century French
translation was bequeathed to the British Library. There, in the early
nineteen-nineties, Vignali's work was discovered by a graduate student
at Columbia—Ian Frederick Moulton—who was doing research on
Renaissance erotica. Even at the end of the twentieth century,
credentialled readers who had wangled entrée to the "Private Case" (a
collection of pornography donated by the Victorian erotomane Henry
Spencer Ashbee, the author of "My Secret Life") were, Moulton notes,
obliged to consult its contents at a special desk close to the
librarians, presumably with both hands in view. Moulton has translated
"La Cazzaria" into English for the first time, as "The Book of the
Prick" (Routledge; $18.95). His exemplary introduction is nearly as
long as the text itself and twice as worthwhile. It provides the
historical perspective and intellectual sobriety missing from what
Moulton tactfully describes as a "learned, but childish," fable that
is, even by the most liberal modern standards, a complete
gross-out—though probably not to anyone who has tuned in to Howard
Stern.

Cazzo is the vulgar Italian word for the male organ, hence the title,
whose "closest English rendering," Moulton writes, "is probably
'cockery'—but that is too close to 'cookery.' . . . 'Prickery' might
work, but it lacks the specificity of the Italian word. In English,
'prick' is a word with many meanings; in Italian, 'cazzo' can mean
only one thing. In the text, I have translated 'cazzo' as 'cock,' but
'Book of the Cock' sounds like it might have something to do with
poultry, so for the working English title, I settled on 'Book of the
Prick.' " Anglo-Saxon sexual slang, however, has a much harsher impact
on the ear than its mellifluous Romance counterpart, and equivalent
terms don't carry the same charge. The percussive monosyllables and/or
double final consonants of cock, balls, shit, dick, buttocks,
jerk-off, prick, cunt, and fuck have a blunt, expletive force that
isn't rendered by (and betrays the puckish delicacy of) cazzo, potta,
culo, fica, scopare, merda, coglioni, and cacca. The verbs incazzare
and inculare, especially used reflexively, are certainly rude, but
hardly so heavy-handed as "to take it up the ass." It's the
difference, perhaps, between Ariel's nimble tongue and Caliban's thick
one.

It would be satisfying, if only for the worthy Moulton's sake, to
report that "La Cazzaria" is a masterpiece rescued from obscurity by a
feat of heroic exegesis, but, even making allowances for the nuances
inevitably lost in translation, a masterpiece is something shapelier
and more solid than an extended riff, however much fun it is.
Vignali's antic prose staggers in and out of coherence like a student
video ad-libbed as it is shot, and it also reminded me of the
scatological graffiti, most of it in Latin, that one finds in the
catacombs of Roman churches, and which seems to have been etched into
the stone expressly to deflate, for future generations, the mystique
of antiquity.

The animator of "La Cazzaria" is a priapic scholar steeped in the
classics who refers to himself by Vignali's own nom de plume, Arsiccio
Intronato. Arsiccio means "burned," as in scorched by lust, and when
the dialogue begins he is intent on seducing a younger academician
named Sodo Intronato—the pseudonym of Vignali's friend Marcantonio
Piccolomini. Sodo is laughably ignorant of human anatomy and plumbing,
and of nearly all sexual matters, including such basics as "why
kissing feels good"; "why women have periods"; "why the crotch is
hairy"; and "why jerking off was invented," not to mention such
headier questions as "why monks invented confession" (to ascertain if
there were any "secrets in the art of fucking" they didn't know) and,
on a slightly more elevated note, "why no one today has profound
knowledge" (people are too busy "making money, dominating others, and
similar things . . . because wealth has placed its feet on virtue's
neck"). The conversation is introduced by a letter from a third member
of the confraternity, Il Bizzarro, who claims to have borrowed this
"naughty" text while waiting impatiently in Arsiccio's study for a
"filthy, succulent, and smutty" wench his host has promised to serve
up. "Although our Arsiccio has always shown himself to be an enemy to
women in all his affairs," Il Bizzarro writes, "he is nonetheless as
eager for their secrets as a monkey is for crayfish."

The conceit of a found manuscript was a convention of the Platonic
dialogue. Castiglione, for example, employs it for the "Book of the
Courtier," and it briefly occurred to me that Moulton's account of
finding a sensational text with an arcane publishing history written
by a sex-crazed proto-Foucault was the conceit of a postmodern novel.
In this case, it promises rather more in the way of esoteric
revelation than the text delivers, partly because Sodo is such a
dimwit, and partly because Vignali's fable runs on raw nerve rather
than imagination.

In a seventeenth-century history of the Intronati, Vignali was
described as a "brilliant spirit" who "was accounted almost a monster
because of his deformed body." (The writer doesn't specify the nature
of the deformity.) He apparently fathered two legitimate sons, but
extant documents make no mention of a wife. His work flaunts his
preference for pliant youths of his own class. Homosexual camaraderie
in general and man-boy love in particular flourished in Renaissance
Tuscany, as it tends to in cultures that worship women's purity by
keeping them locked up. Moulton makes an interesting analogy between
the "hyper-intellectual" machismo of Vignali and his circle and that
of the (mostly) hyper-heterosexual Spanish artists of the
nineteen-thirties, whose graphic forays into coprophilia and
masturbation (Dali), priapism (Picasso), and perversity (Buñuel) were
also part of a revolt against orthodox Catholicism, and an impulse to
take refuge in absurdity and surrealism from an increasingly
repressive and chaotic political climate. Intronato can mean "deaf" as
well as "stunned" (though, with a little poetic license, one might
also translate it as "stoned," and the rambling tone of "La Cazzaria"
leaves the impression that Vignali dashed it off in a state of
intoxication). But the name, Moulton tells us, was an ironic reference
to the spiritual battering that refined characters endure in periods
of civic violence and instability. Siena's independence was being
menaced externally by the competing forces of the Hapsburg Empire and
the Valois of France, and from within by the murderous intrigues among
the five hereditary factions (monti) that ruled the Republic.

Despite the fact that his own noble family belonged to the preëminent
Monte dei Nove, Vignali made them the villains of a parable that a
less faithful translator might have been tempted to entitle "Genital
Farm." Drawing ironically upon accounts by Livy and Plutarch of a
speech by the Roman senator Menenius Agrippa to a revolutionary mob
(which Shakespeare, a little later, and without the irony, cribbed for
a scene in Act I of "Coriolanus"), he dramatizes the internecine
struggles that were wasting his city as a tale of warring body parts,
though not the head, belly, and limbs of the classical version.
Arsiccio describes to Sodo how the Big Cocks and their prideful
consorts, the Beautiful Cunts, once formed a dominant party that
tyrannized a coalition of the lesser-endowed: the Little Cocks and
their allies, the Ugly Cunts and Assholes, whose plot for a democratic
revolution was betrayed by the cowardly and opportunistic Balls. In
the course of the fable, the victors reassert their mastery and wreak
their revenge with the kind of atrocious violations that recent
history has reclaimed from the realm of Sadean fantasy. But then,
Arsiccio continues, at the urging of a wise if bloodthirsty seeress
known as the Great Cunt of Modena, the vanquished negotiate their
differences in a fraternal fashion, and strike back at their
oppressors, who are, in turn, slaughtered or dispersed. "I will say
this about the Big Cocks," Modena concludes. "It is very possible they
have taken refuge with some foreign power, from where, in a short
time, seeing our discord, they may return to ruin and destroy each of
us." Her moral is a little vague, though it seems sound: the phallus
represents power without a conscience; it cannot, therefore, be
trusted; while it sometimes lies low, you can't keep it down.

Vignali lived at a moment not without a certain cautionary relevance
to the present, in which the avidity of a privileged generation
shaking itself free from fundamentalism coexists with profound anxiety
at the prospect of losing that insouciance to a dictatorship of the
right-thinking. Rabelais and Aretino are probably the best known of
the many pungent writers working in the same mode. They, as Moulton
puts it, "revel in bodily functions, both sexual and digestive." He
also cites the poet Lorenzo Venier, the author of "La Puttana errante"
("The Wandering Whore"), and Niccolò Franco, whose political diatribes
in verse employed "shocking, sexualized invective to attack their
enemies." "La Cazzaria," he continues, "never mentions Machiavelli
directly, but it is not hard to sense his influence" in the conception
of the state both as a much violated woman and a "female body" of
"abiding and unfathomable strength . . . which no man can completely
control."

Though Vignali is more extreme than the least inhibited of his
contemporaries, and less artful and lucid than the greatest of them,
he shares their rebellious impulse to subvert the sanctimony of
pedants, the cruelty of the potent, the authority of patriarchs, and
the prestige of virtue; to challenge the medieval dualism of mind and
body; and to dose his readers with a bitter aphrodisiac grown in that
fertile mire of carnal knowledge which, he believes, nourishes the
blood of a secular body politic. "No matter how ugly and vulgar a
thing is," Arsiccio argues, "it is more ugly and vulgar" not to
understand it. Almost three hundred years before Sade, Vignali
conflates enlightenment with corruption, and, in one of the earliest
and, it has to be said, most repellent test cases for free speech, he
asserts a quintessential civil liberty, one that becomes more precious
as it grows more fragile: the freedom to offend.

Legend has it that once upon a time there was a place of exploration, honesty and wonder. Some say it was destroyed by pettiness, others maintain it foundered on the rocks of idle foolishness, and a few claim the whole thing simply faded back into the moil of chaos from whence it came. No matter - as the old saying goes: stultus est sicut stultus facit, and stupidly we will begin again!