With Philip Roth In Tarzana Poem by gershon hepner

Tarzan teaches us that sex that’s torrid
should hardly be condemned as somewhat horrid.
Settling as he did in California,
where town and valley gals are sometimes hornier
than he, he found a comic strip joint he named
Tarzana, where he didn’t feel ashamed
to linger with a loincloth. Other apes
who moved there now highlight their shapes
with Botox, collagen and augmentation
of breasts, enhancing Californication,
that’s guaranteed, once they've had liposuction,
to make them Tarzan’s targets of seduction.

Killers not of black men or of beasts,
but dressed to kill, the airhead primates chase
the Tarzans who, on freeways are the feasts
whom they consume on land. Though aerospace
is more important there than jungles they
are equally adept as Tarzan to attract
the species that they hunt, male human prey,
in Southern California trained to act.

Edgar Burroughs' middle name was Rice,
which, when it's really wild, is nice,
but Tarzan's loins when covered with a cloth
have far less charm than those of Philip Roth,
who after Portnoy never has complained
about his reputation, though it has been stained
no less than all the sheets on which he lay
his words like jungle fruits or sunshine hay.
Both heroes’ loins have aged, and maybe bungle
what town and valley girls want in the jungle,
but men who cannot swing from trees still try
to swing in bedrooms, where they death defy.

Inspired by an article by Michael Kimmelman on an exhibition of Tarzan in the Musée Quai de Branly in Paris (Civilized, Sure, but a Loincloth Sets Parisian Hears Aflutter, ' NYT, August 6,2009) :
This being a serious museum, there are a few genuine African totems and shields, which look as out of place in this context as Maureen O'Sullivan did, toting her banana-leaf pocketbook and wearing a pair of homemade pumps, while standing in the bush beside the loinclothed Johnny Weissmuller and two forlorn elephants in the film “Tarzan Finds a Son! ” he show has been wildly popular. Its organizers cogitate, with Gallic élan, on Tarzan’s proto-environmentalism; his philosophical roots in Rousseau and the 19th-century nudist movement; his literary antecedents in Kipling and H. M. Stanley; and his mythological reliance on the stories of Hercules and Romulus and Remus. The exhibition also makes hay about the first words Tarzan uttered not in ape grunts but the language of civilized men: “Mais oui, ” the young Lord Greystoke said…
The highborn “killer of beasts and many black men, ” as Tarzan unfortunately described himself in “Tarzan of the Apes, ” was conceived just before World War I by Burroughs, a former gold miner and cowboy, in a climate of American expansionism, late colonialism and institutionalized racism. Before he died in 1950 Burroughs published about two dozen Tarzan potboilers, his fictional character becoming an increasingly fantastical figure, speaking a dozen languages while battling the teensy Minunians and dinosaurs. An easygoing guy with a fondness for golf who settled in what came to be called, thanks to him, Tarzana, Calif., Burroughs never bothered to set foot in Africa, which is why Tarzan also faced off against Asian tigers and killed lions by wrestling them into a full nelson. As Gore Vidal once phrased it, the author of Tarzan was “not one to compromise a vivid unconscious with dim reality.” This turned out to make his work like catnip for Hollywood producers who, beginning in 1918, released Tarzan movies more frequently than Burroughs did books. They were the perfect vehicles for parading stars in various states of undress. “In the first Tarzan movies, ” said Charles Tesson, who picked the film clips for the show, “Tarzan wears a tuxedo. After Weissmuller took the role, he becomes a superhero, an abandoned child, an amnesiac, a naïf, pure but strong, très sportif.”

8/6/09