Cavafy Translated: In the Same Space

I get my bee in a bonnet about Cavafy’s rhymed poems going unrhymed in English translation. This time, I’m not so happy about an unrhymed Cavafy poem that I can’t find a good translation for.

Here’s my attempt at a decent translation, which you can compare with the Keeley/Sherrard version over at the Cavafy archive.

In the Same Space

Homes and plazas, neighbourhood surrounds
Where I observe and walk; years and years on end

I crafted you in sorrows, crafted you in joy:
From countless incidents, from countless details

To sentiment transformed, wholly, for me

Στον ίδιο χώρο

Οικίας περιβάλλον, κέντρων, συνοικίας
που βλέπω κι όπου περπατώ· χρόνια και χρόνια.

Σε δημιούργησα μες σε χαρά και μες σε λύπες:
με τόσα περιστατικά, με τόσα πράγματα.

Κ’ αισθηματοποιήθηκες ολόκληρο, για μένα.

PS: for an excellent rhymed translation of an excellent Cavafy poem, check out what Stratis Haviaris did with Amelianos Monae. Stupendous stuff.

The Lyrical Themes of Rembetika: A Woman Scorned

I’m a sunny guy who grew up loving melancholy music. Grunge was my bag, Radiohead my sweet love, The Smiths an overwrought delight.

What I never properly noticed, though, was the heavy shit my parents were listening to.

My parents are Greek immigrants to Melbourne. Greeks love Greek music — and all Greek music has rembetika as its basis.

Rembetika is best described as bleak as fuck. Like a good Jewish maternal stereotype, Greeks do love their heavy-handed melodrama. But what makes rembetika more than a caricature is its foundation in the horrible times Greeks lived through during the first half of the twentieth century.

So over the course of a few posts, I plan to highlight some of the lyrics of popular songs that are venerated by pretty much every Greek of my parents’ generation and would make any Australian parent of the current generation blanche.

And in this post, the lyrical theme I present is The Woman Scorned.

In the male-dominated world of Greek society in which these songs were written, life could be especially brutal for women. Women had few rights and barely any recourse that extended beyond singing mournfully about their plight. When a man did a woman wrong, the effects could be catastrophic, and songs of women scorned are a particular source of lyrical power.

Perhaps my favourite is Γεννήθηκα για να Πονώ, or I Was Born To Be Hurt. Combined with Marika Ninou’s fierce singing, the song stings with bitter resentment and a deep wish for vengeance. Here are some of the choice lines:

Γεννήθηκα για να πονώ και για να τυραννιέμαι
I was born to be hurt and to be tyrannised
την ώρα που σε γνώρισα βαριά την καταριέμαι
that moment I met you, I curse it deeply
Με πλήγωσες και δεν ξεχνώ που τόσο έχω κλάψει
You hurt me and I’ll never forget how much I’ve cried
να γίνει η κατάρα μου φωτιά και να σε κάψει
May my curse become fire and burn you

Reminder: this is a classic song that everyone in Greece knows. It’s as well known there as Hound Dog or Tutti Frutti, a song the whole family will sing along to.

Next is a more melancholic song of mistreatment and woe. The song is called Αντιλαλούνε τα Βουνά, or The Echoing Mountains.

Στενάζω απ’ τις λαβωματιές κι απ’ τις δικές σου μαχαιριές
I moan from my wounds and from your stabbings
λαβωματιές με γέμισες και μ’ έφαγαν οι πόνοι
You’ve covered me with wounds and the pains have overtaken me
και στη φωτιά που μ’ έριξες, τίποτα δε με σώνει
And from the fires you’ve thrown me into, nothing will save me

Αντιλαλούνε τα βουνά σαν κλαίω εγώ τα δειλινά
The mountains echo out when I cry at sunset

The mountain echo of your cries at sunset is just a standard Greek song. This is not considered emo.

And my third and final example of a woman’s lament for her man’s treachery:

Κρίμα τους κόπους μου και τις θυσίες μου και όσα τράβηξα τόσο καιρό για σένα
It’s a shame that my efforts, my sacrifices, everything I went through for you
κρίμα τα όνειρα και τις ελπίδες μου τα πήρε ο άνεμος και πήγανε χαμένα
It’s a shame that my hopes were taken by the wind and forsaken

Εσένα δε σου άξιζε αγάπη εσένα δε σου άξιζε στοργή
You weren’t worthy of love, you weren’t worthy of affection
έχεις στο αίμα σου την αμαρτία είσ’ ένα ψέμα χωρίς ψυχή
You have sin in your blood, you are a lie without a soul

Next time someone does you wrong, you go tell them: you are a lie without a soul.

Australian Taxation and Asset Prices

Does Australia have a housing bubble? I reckon yes. But that’s beside the point of this here post. I’ve seen many articles pointing out that tax incentives are making asset prices rise more than they otherwise would. What they fail to point out is that the taxation-induced effects on prices on the way down are more severe than they are on the way up.

Australia has a 50% capital gains tax discount, meaning that only half of any profit made from capital gains is taxed. Australia also allows any negative gearing to reduce your taxable income. When asset prices are rising, this means investors can gear themselves up, reduce their income tax bill every year and pocket any eventual capital gains with a 50% discount on the taxes they pay.

Lucky investor you might say. But Australia’s tax arrangements turbo charge both the rise and fall of asset prices due to higher investment demand than there otherwise would be because of the tax incentives. As soon as asset prices fall, the tax advantages evaporate and losses remain losses. So while Australia’s taxation system is excellent for investors when asset prices are on the way up, it’s disastrous when prices are on the way down. And worse than that, the effect of the 50% tax discount on capital gains is significantly more powerful on any falls in asset prices than they are on any rises.

If only considering the tax treatment of negative gearing, the taxation-induced incentive to sell would be just as strong as the taxation-induced incentive to buy. But Australia’s capital gains tax discount perversely boosts the incentive to sell when asset prices go off the boil. This is because the 50% tax discount on capital gains only applies when asset prices rise. There is no 50% boost on tax offsets from capital losses when asset prices fall. The 50% tax discount applies asymmetrically, meaning that there are only benefits when asset prices rise. Because there are benefits only when prices rise, the effect of Australia’s taxation system on sell offs is stronger when prices fall.

Of course, the capital gains tax discount and deductible negative gearing do artificially boost asset prices — but that was a once-off when the changes were first introduced, bringing more investors into the picture. That one-off taxation-induced boost in asset prices will remain for as long as the tax incentives remain, and so will the turbo-charging of rises and falls in asset prices around the one-off boost.

I have no crystal ball on property prices. Maybe they will never fall — that’s not beyond the realms of theoretical possibility. But what is certain is that should property start falling in price, that fall will be steeper than it otherwise would be because of Australia’s taxation system.

Cavafy and The City Following the Original’s Rhyme

I love Cavafy, and especially The City, or ‘Η Πόλις’.

At Words Without Borders, there’s a whole article about how difficult it is to translate the works of Cavafy, using The City as an example. Included in the article are a number of different translations of the poem and some comparative analysis.

But what the article doesn’t make mention of is what’s glaringly missing from each of the translations: none of them rhyme. The Greek original is wonderfully rhymed and none of the translations presented even pretend to follow Cavafy’s rhyming scheme.

I decided to make Cavafy’s The City rhyme in English. Like the original Greek, it’s end-rhymed according to ABBCCDDA. Here’s how it goes.

The City (translated from the Greek)

Constantine Cavafy

You said “I’ll leave for another land, I’ll leave for another sea
Another city I will find, another better
Yet every bid will fail, doomed, to the letter
My heart — like the dead — in dirt’s terrain
My mind, until when, in rot to remain?
Wherever here I turn, wherever my eye is taken
The blackened ruins of my life I see forsaken,
And all the years I spent and wasted — spoiled — a detainee”

The city will follow you. Through the same beats
You’ll traipse, you’ll age within the selfsame streets;
In the same houses you’ll turn gray and mope.
You’re in this city always. Something else — abandon hope —
There is no boat for you, there is no road.
Just as you wasted here the life you sowed
In this hole, so spoiled the same all over, diseased.

Η Πόλις

Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης

Είπες· «Θα πάγω σ’ άλλη γη, θα πάγω σ’ άλλη θάλασσα.
Μια πόλις άλλη θα βρεθεί καλλίτερη απ’ αυτή.
Κάθε προσπάθεια μου μια καταδίκη είναι γραφτή·
κ’ είν’ η καρδιά μου -σαν νεκρός- θαμένη.
Ο νους μου ως πότε μες στον μαρασμόν αυτόν θα μένει.
Οπου το μάτι μου γυρίσω, όπου κι αν δω
ερείπια μαύρα της ζωής μου βλέπω εδώ,
που τόσα χρόνια πέρασα και ρήμαξα και χάλασα.»

Καινούργιους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού -μη ελπίζεις-
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.
Ετσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ

The Fifth Beatle, Plato, and the Rolling Stones of Aristotle

Some would have you think it’s a pointless argument, a debate hardly worth engaging with, the equivalent of bald men fighting over a comb. I tell you otherwise: the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones is yet another chapter in a recurring theme that springs eternal. It’s Plato versus Aristotle; Apollo versus Dionysus; it’s the sky versus the earth, the timeless ideal versus the vital ephemeral: it’s the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones.

The story goes that the Beatles wrote Norwegian Wood in 1965, Eleanor Rigby in 1966, Blackbird in 1968. Now, to get at why the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones is so much more than just a simple rivalry between bands, I will begin by convincing you that those dates are all wrong — and I won’t be resorting to conspiracy theories, time-bending physics or dream sequences to do so. No, all I need is Plato.

A Brief Platonic Interlude

Among other things, Plato sought to explain a particularly curious ability of the human mind: it can pick out objects and effortlessly categorise them. Take dogs, for instance. We can recognise all these disparate objects — the chihuahua, the German shepherd, the dachshund — as dogs without ever confusing them with other four-legged animals such as wolves, foxes or bears. We do this effortlessly, so effortlessly in fact that it took someone like Plato to notice how particularly impressive a skill it is.

For us to categorise objects, Plato argued we must already be aware of the categories that we lump objects into. So before we can categorise dogs as dogs in the effortless and consistent way that we do, Plato thought that the idea of dogs already exists in our minds as a timeless canine form, lying there in wait, ready for use once we stumble across objects recognisable as dogs.

Likewise, if our minds can distinguish disparate objects as dogs and lump them into an abstract canine form that is elemental and timeless, Plato argued that all the other abstract entities we engage with, the good, the great, the beautiful, must be equally essential and timeless. A beautiful flower, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful melody: to Plato, they each reflect beauty’s form just as much as the chihuahua and the dachshund reflect the canine.

Platonic Beauty in Music

And if one were to do now as Plato once did and consider beauty’s form in the musical realm, one would immediately consider My Favourite Things. Julie Andrews and John Coltrane make for strange bedfellows, but My Favourite Things does what few other songs can: it transcends its renditions, so much so that a dragon-chasing musical visionary often overcome by the darkness of this mortal coil could find inspiration among raindrops on roses and kittens with whiskers. Not even the overly saccharine Sound of Music can hide the delicious headiness of the melody, and although John Coltrane might have made My Favourite Things hip, any old schmo who makes a reasonably faithful rendition of the song will never render it unpleasant.  

Sure, you might say, our day and age is replete with top-ten lists of seemingly vast musical differences, so there hardly appears to be any universality possible and this whole Platonic business is bonkers. But although we focus on our subjective differences — I consider Coldplay an abomination, as should the rest of you damn it! — the very discussion we have over subjective differences is possible because of certain musical fundamentals we all hear in the same way. Even without a hint of musical theory, we each hear, for instance, the arrangement of notes in a major key sounding perky and in a minor key sombre; or a C and a C# played together as a grating, unsettling sound; or two notes an octave apart sharing an aural unity that renders them, paradoxically, the same note. So too do we hear My Favourite Things as a delight — because we’ve been made that way, by God, by evolution, by whatever cosmic force that has led to the development of humankind. Rodgers and Hammerstein brought to light properties of the human mind that were theretofore unknown: that the waxing and waning and sashaying of the notes that make up My Favourite Things are the quintessence of musical bewitchment, and in any of its guises, some more hip than others, the song’s core enraptures.

My Favourite Things is the Platonic song par excellence, timelessly and universally beautiful. You could say Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t so much write the song; rather, they were the prophets through which aspects of beauty’s form were revealed. In the same way, the Beatles too were Platonists. They wrote songs akin to My Favourite Things. Unlike we benighted commoners, the Beatles were Prometheus, stealing fire from the Gods and enlightening each and every one of us on beauty’s form via music. While it’s by no means a constant in the Beatles back catalogue, they often revealed beauty’s eternal handiwork in such songs as Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, Norwegian Wood, Yesterday. Paul McCartney admitted as much himself: he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d already heard Yesterday. What he didn’t know was that he had indeed already heard the song, as had everyone else, because Yesterday was always there, awaiting revelation, awaiting to enrapture, the musical embodiment of beauty’s eternal form. That’s why one could say it’s not entirely accurate to speak of many of the Beatles’ classic compositions as having been written in a particular year: those songs already existed, and our minds had no choice but to be charmed.

An Aristotelian Interlude

If on Plato’s iPod My Favourite Things is on repeat, Louie Louie is banging away in Aristotle’s. In Louie Louie, there exists not a jot that’s musically notable. At its core there lies only dull, harebrained simplicity. Diametrically opposed to My Favourite Things, the only thing interesting in Louie Louie is the rendition, the simplicity allowing the space for inspired performance, for cock-a-hoops and shout outs, for mood and feel, for joyous sloppiness and youthful abandon. The colour, the joy, the fun and the delight in the countless renditions of Louie Louie come from everything that is not the notes. Julie Andrews would murder Louie Louie; John Coltrane wouldn’t even bother with it. They’re not performers who make colourful, vital, gnarled, slapdash and glorious messes out of music. Bands like the Rolling Stones do that. And Aristotle gloried in it.

Contra Plato, Aristotle had no truck with forms or overwrought theories to explain categorisation. For Aristotle, there are no timeless forms — just a bunch of objects of various shapes and sizes that we as humans have munged together into the same category over time. This chihuahua looks like that chihuahua, which sort of shares a bunch of characteristics with that dachsund and looks nothing like that shark over there. Repeat a few times and, bob’s your uncle, we end up with a category of dog.

Aristotle revelled in particulars: he loved this or that dog and their glorious variations. He got so good at this, at cataloguing the varieties of species in the animal world, that he’s considered the first biologist. Plato, on the other hand, didn’t much care for individual dogs running around in the world. Plato considered the sensory life an illusion, a cosmic joke played on those who waste their time with the ephemeral shadows emanating from the higher abstract forms. If we transfer this line of thinking to music, Plato couldn’t have cared less for all the existing G notes and would ponder the one true G note. Conversely, Aristotle loved every variety of G: the G from a muted trumpet, the G from a distorted guitar, the G from a harpsichord, a violin or a glockenspiel. Plato revered the idealised G, Aristotle the realised. Even if My Favourite Things were played on a $10 Casio keyboard, Plato would hear the idealised tune in his head and be lost to its delights as a composition, barely noticing the primitive electronic sound. Aristotle, on the other hand, he’d be disgusted that such a classic song was being debased by cheap musical geegaws and demand to hear Coltrane’s reinvention of the song through noise-cancelling headphones plugged into a turntable.

The Rolling Stones of Aristotle

No doubt, too, Aristotle would have been a Rolling Stones man. Like Aristotle, the Rolling Stones were never interested in anything formal; instead, they were always about the thrill of performance and the buzzing warmth of music enveloping the skin. The Beatles stopped playing live well before they released their finest work while the Rolling Stones are still playing live long well after they released their finest work. In some happy, perfect world, do the Rolling Stones write the Beatles compositions and perform them?

Yet despite their hallowed career, the Rolling Stones don’t really make sense: there’s barely a melody in most Rolling Stones material; Keith Richards plays the same Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed chords over and over again; the rhythm section is basically straight up and down four-four rock. The Rolling Stones should be as ordinary as the band that plays round the corner. Instead, the Rolling Stones took rock and roll further than it had gone before, showcasing along the way what an emphasis on everything that isn’t the notes can do.

Gimme Shelter sounds like the apocalypse; Stray Cat Blues is positively filthy. Jumpin’ Jack Flash is the musical incarnation of excitement, of danger, of style. Coltrane at times could be all those things, but he can’t play Jumpin’ Jack Flash:  it’s all riff, no real harmony, the melody basically percussive. There’s nothing substantial for Coltrane to rearrange into a jazz ensemble. The song wouldn’t work on a trumpet, a glockenspiel, an oboe. No, the song is all performance and only works in that particular sonic configuration, tailored specifically for those instruments, with Keith’s fuzzed-out tone and many layers of wickedly weaving guitars, with Jagger’s rhythmic vocal snarl. In Jumpin’ Jack Flash and so much else, the Rolling Stones were musical alchemists, managing to transmute the stock-standard elements of rock and roll into glorious representations of attitude, rebelliousness and rambunctiousness that became sonic badges of identity. The Beatles can be enjoyed purely by the head, seduced as it is by their sumptuous melodies. The Rolling Stones: they head straight for the hips, right where carefree libidinousness and youthful abandon can be shaken free.


Take Blackbird and Sweet Black Angel as cases in point, both of which were about civil rights in the USA and featured on sprawling double albums. Like My Favourite Things, Blackbird is a song of incredible beauty and compositional delight. Its intricate harmonic and rhythmic pattern, inspired by a Bach piece for the lute, is an enthralling joy. Its rendition, though, is cloying, a little twee and very, well, Paul McCartney. Sweet Black Angel is by far Blackbird’s inferior compositionally. But if one is so inclined as to wear a grin of glee through an energetic performance of Louie Louie, Sweet Black Angel’s feel casts aside its compositional shortcomings and renders the song celebratory. Blackbird sounds like a toff earnestly extolling the virtues of the civil rights movement while enjoying his round of golf; Sweet Black Angel sounds like the thrill of cross pollination, of everyday white and black people getting on together and getting it on together. You bop to Sweet Black Angel with your hips;  you hum Blackbird while daydreaming in your head.

The Rolling Stones were the better rock-and-roll band while the Beatles were the better musicians who happened to be in a rock-and-roll band. Throughout the world of music, the universal appeal of the Beatles serves as inspiration. Yet despite being modern-day icons, the Rolling Stones have never had the same broad-based appeal that the Beatles enjoyed. To be a Rolling Stone, you have to understand their music to be rebellious and to rejoice in it, all of which requires appreciating the social meaning of their sound. The Rolling Stones are one of the best examples of the coupling of music and identity, of how performance can lend itself to appreciation just as fundamentally as does composition. In the visceral thrill of punk and metal, in the textural experiments of indie bands, in music as a sonic badge of identity, we hear the Rolling Stones.

But we do not solely exist within subcultures. There must be a universal basis to our appreciation of music: how else could we conduct our conversations and debates if not for some shared language, some shared core? That does not mean the universal need have any sway over the particular or that the debate need find resolution. The Beatles versus the Rolling Stones is a debate that shall continue to spring eternal because each of us is partly Platonic, partly Aristotelian, one side playing off the other as we age in feedback loops DJ’d by nature and nurture. We all want to revel in Aristotelian actualisation and Platonic patterns of formal brilliance; the mind need not reject the body, nor the body the mind. Inclinations, however, are inclinations. You might tend Platonic, you might tend Aristotelian; just know there’s something to be enjoyed on either side and the ear is no passive listener. Appreciate music shorn of its sonic texture, purely as composition; appreciate music steeped in its time, place and sonic language. Be a Beatle, be a Stone — and maybe get to glory in all sides.

All Our Yesterdays by Jorges Luis Borges

Borges loved the sonnet, and I love his All Our Yesterdays (not Todos Nuestros Ayeres — the poem’s title was originally published in English*). And so I thought I’d translate the poem into English much like I did Borges’ Spinoza.

Robert Mezey has already translated All Our Yesterdays, but it doesn’t rhyme. I thought I’d translate the poem and preserve the rhyme, albeit structured differently. The original is rhymed ABBA CDDC EFFE GG. I’ve rhymed the translation in the classic Shakespearean form of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

All Our Yesterdays
I want to know: which who of all the whos
I’ve been is due my past? The boy who traced
out Latin lines hexameter that hues
lustrous of passing years have now effaced?
Perhaps that lad who sought those savage selves —
tigers and panthers — or the curves precise
of maps and charts in father’s library shelves
is he to whom belongs my past concise?
Or he who pushed a door ajar where lay
a dying man in everlasting sleep,
yes he the boy who kissed in the bright of day
the face departing, dead, forsaken deep?
I am all those who are no more. In vain
I am this night those lost to life’s terrain.

All Our Yesterdays*
Quiero saber de quién es mi pasado.
¿De cuál de los que fui? ¿Del ginebrino
que trazó algún hexámetro latino
que los lustrales años han borrado?
¿Es de aquel niño que buscó en la entera
biblioteca del padre las puntuales
curvaturas del mapa y las ferales
formas que son el tigre y la pantera?
¿O de aquel otro que empujó una puerta
detrás de la que un hombre se moría
para siempre, y besó en el blanco día
la cara que se va y la cara muerta?
Soy los que ya no son. Inútilmente
soy en la tarde esa perdida gente.

* the original poem, written in Spanish, was published with the title All Our Yesterdays in English. The title references Macbeth, who said famously:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Retrying Selenium Tests

Selenium tests are dreamy: how spectacular that your whole UI can be given a right thrashing on a variety of browsers! But intermittent Selenium test failures… now, they are truly the bane of one’s existence, especially when they hold up progress in a continuous build environment.

So enter: the retry test listener.

In my company’s suite of Selenium tests, there’s a small percentage that always seem to fail intermittently. We mark those tests as retry candidates, and if they do fail, they’ll be given another shot at passing.

To get something similar set up, firstly, implement an ITestListener like so:

public class RetrySeleniumTestListener implements ITestListener {
    private static final Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(RetrySeleniumTestListener.class);

    public void onTestFailure(final ITestResult result) {
        final IRetryAnalyzer retryAnalyzer = result.getMethod().getRetryAnalyzer();
        if (retryAnalyzer != null && retryAnalyzer instanceof RetrySeleniumTestCounter && ((RetrySeleniumTestCounter) retryAnalyzer).isOnFirstRun()) {
  "Test failed on first run and will be marked as skipped: " + result);
            // You might ask: why not set this result as skipped in RetrySeleniumTestCounter? 
            // That's too late and the change in status is ignored. 
            // Have to do it here instead.

        Here would be the the implementations of the other methods of ITestListener

Next up, implement an IRetryAnalyzer like so:

public class RetrySeleniumTestCounter implements IRetryAnalyzer {

    private int retryCount;

    public boolean retry(final ITestResult result) {
        if (retryCount < 1) {
            return true;
        return false;

    public boolean isOnFirstRun() {
        return retryCount == 0;

And then annotate your intermittently failing test methods and test classes appropriately like so:

@Listeners({ RetrySeleniumTestListener.class })
public class DataExtractsSeleniumTest extends AdmanagerSeleniumTestCase {

    @Test(retryAnalyzer = RetrySeleniumTestCounter.class)
    public void testCannotAccessFunctionalityForUsers() {
        // Contents of intermittently failing test method

Selenium then knows to apply the test listener to the annotated class, and the retry counter is then applied to the annotated methods.

And voilà, those intermittently failing tests now get a second chance at passing.

The Cunnilingus Suite: When Prince Goes Down South

Ah Prince. You’ve given us Wendy and Lisa, and you’ve given us Vanity 6 and Apollonia purifying herself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Are you about female empowerment, or are you about female objectification? Whichever is the case, there is no doubt that in the boudoir Prince is a thoroughgoing egalitarian who revels in mutual sexual gratification. He gets off when she gets off, and what becomes clear to any Prince fan is that he loves to go down south and sing its praises. So much so, in fact, that I make the following claim: no other musician has written as many songs featuring cunnilingus, and no one has written as many songs describing how joyously good it is.

And so here I present Prince’s Cunnilingus Suite, the evidence I submit to prove the claim that Prince is indeed the musical world’s greatest panegyrist of the pudenda. In all, it’s eleven songs featuring cunnilingus from the wet pen of the purple one. There are probably more I’ve missed, and there are plenty more that suggest more, and then there are the songs that are from the point of view of the pussy, but for now, here are fifteen songs that require no cunning to figure out that cunnilingus is indeed what they’re about.

Come from the album Come
Come is a sweltering 11-minute paean to pleasuring one’s partner. It’s immense and intense and full of cunnilingus. A funky, sexual standout in Prince’s oeuvre.

Lickin’ you inside, outside
All sides, up and down
With my tongue in the crease, baby I go ’round
When I go down, down, down

If I Was Your Girlfriend from Sign O’ The Times
A stone-cold Prince classic about physical and emotional intimacy.

And would you, would you let me kiss you there
You know, down there where it counts
I’ll do it so good, I swear I’ll drink every ounce
And then I’ll hold you tight and hold you long
And together we’ll stare into silence

Automatic from 1999
Written, produced and arranged by Prince. He’s a control freak, except in the boudoir, where he relishes relinquishing control.

I’ll go down on you all night long, it’s automatic
Yes I will, babe

Head from Dirty Mind
When Prince’s tongue is not down south, it’s lodged firmly in his cheek: Head is hilarious, morning, noon and night.

And you said, “I must confess,
I wanna get undressed and go to bed.”
With that I jammed, you fool,
You married me instead
Now morning, noon, and night
I give u
Til you’re burnin’ up

Lovesexy from the album Lovesexy
Might this be the only case of back-to-back songs featuring cunnilingus on any album? This and the following song can be lapped up on the Lovesexy album, which was released after a religious awakening that didn’t seem to staunch any of Prince’s libidinousness.

U want (Lovesexy) me to s…suck around your living room
Ha Ha
Yeah, U…U want me to walk right down your halls
mmm hmmm
U want me to swivel in your love seat
Don’t U baby’
U want me to write my name on your walls
U want me to write my name

When 2 R In Love from The Black Album and Lovesexy
Prince’s version of high romance and loving devotion.

When 2 R in love
The thought of his tongue in the V of her love
In his mind, this thought it leads the pack

On The Couch from Musicology
Cunnilingus pops into Prince’s mind while watching the TV. Just like that.

Love Jones is on the TV again, baby
Ooh, I wanna go down south, yeah

Insatiable from Diamonds and Pearls
Insatiable is filthy. I’m actually a little frightened of the song. Cunnilingus is the least of it.

Even if I wasn’t thirsty,
I would drink every drop

The Other Side of the Pillow from The Truth and One Night Alone… Live
He’s staunchly a Jehovah’s Witness at this stage and has disavowed his cussing past. Praise be to cunnilingus, though. Praise be indeed.

Cool as the other side of the pillow
(You’re my baby)
Smooth, I wanna drink you all out

Love 2 the 9s the Love Symbol album
This song seems so innocent musically…

Could u lie down on a bed of thorns
While I drink your ocean dry

The Continental from the Love Symbol album
Tell Me How You Wanna Be Done from Crystal Ball

Conjecture is rife that Alphabet Street is actually about Prince writing out the alphabet with his tongue, and the G that’s missing in the alphabet’s recitation is a reference to the G-spot. Whatever might actually be the case on Alphabet Street, the following lyrics are most definitely about the alphabetical application of the tongue, and Prince thought them to be so good that they’re featured on two songs.

Tell me how u wanna be done (how u wanna be done)
Shall I write the alphabet, (A-B-C-D-E-F-G)
Or shall I just write my name
U tell me, u’re the ruler in this telephone game

Superfunkycalifragisexy from the Black Album
Perhaps the only time Prince is not unequivocally in favour of cunnilingus is while a woman is menstruating. That’s not to say he doesn’t see some clear benefits.

The blood is real good if you drink it real fast
But the aftertaste just lasts and lasts

Love Machine from Graffiti Bridge
Love Machine combines Prince’s love of prime numbers and cunnilingus in the one stanza.

Don’t lie, u want some love that will make u cry
17 tongues licking from the neck down moving in a quickspeed circular motion
round and round, I said it round and round,
like u like it, I can lick it like u like it.

One Kiss At A Time from Emancipation
He’s well and truly married at this stage. Sounds like Mayte Garcia, his then wife, was a lucky woman.

And every nervous twitch that happens when my tongue is there
Your lips, up and down your back and every single hair

Un Crucigrama Críptico: A Cryptic Crossword in Spanish

I’m hardly qualified for the job, but it had to be done: I created a Spanish-language cryptic crossword in the style of the English-language cryptics the Anglophone world knows and loves.

I hadn’t been able to find a Spanish cryptic on the internet. Now when I search for one, I find the one I created. Hopefully some time soon, I’ll find plenty more Spanish cryptics which aren’t my own. No doubt a native speaker of Spanish will do a better job of creating them.

A Short Story: The {Eulogy}

The {Eulogy}















