The View from the Quai Voltaire

'T's been a long day. Tonight Friday showed up wanting lodging (crashing space) for himself and some female or other. He said she was a friend of his, homeless and freezing, waiting in the hall outside the door for me to open unto, recognize and be hospitable to. Like that would happen. "I had been hoping," I said drily, " that you would not spend the night." And so he departed, saying, "fine!" I could tell by the icy dignity with which he said it that, though disappointed, he hadn't expected me to behave differently. Thankfully, I never saw the object (cher objet); though it would have been my pleasure to tell her, or at least to demonstrate to her with deliberate bad manners, how much I resented her attempted intrusion. Checking with the Weather Service, I note that it's 57 degrees fahrenheit outside now, with a predicted low tonight of 35: If she's freezing now, by morning she should be dead.

The View from the Quai Voltair

Jeez, in my dismissiveness I forgot Haendel, whose organ concerti Kristen and I only too infrequently (we forget) play together. The drawback to Haendel and Bach for Kristen, and for me, is the dull, monodic simplicity of the secondo, bass part, over which I as primo have all the other parts. You would think I would like that, but I don't.

Marcus, a friend of forty years, took me to Sunday dinner at the new Vietnamese restaurant on 2nd Avenue. The food was superb, simple, various; the service was done by an intelligent, attentive, strong and beautiful young man with huge diamonds in his earlobes.

Done good with Kristen today, playing the Aria ("Air for the G-string") from the Bach orchestral suite (one of two, I think) in D Major, to start with: We had seven minutes before she had to take something out of the oven. Then, after minor kitchen chores and an excellent pot of coffee, we tackled the 'Linz,' getting the ictus right, getting the notes right. Then we broke for a while, had a smoke and a chat, and resumed with one of our favourite late Haydn symphonies in E Flat, finding, as always, ever greater depths in it. I wish there were a way to put all that on my tombstone.

It's not so much that I disapprove of or dislike music that isn't Bach, Mozart or Haydn, it's just that my first, sincerest impulse is to deny that it exists. Oh well, sure, Beethoven and Schubert, and sometimes Wagner (We're beginning to glide almost faultlessly through the mazy enharmonics of the Siegfried Idyll), but otherwise...nada...Why bother?

The View from the Quai Voltaire

Went to the community center with Friday to do laundry today, and to get a couple of new shirts out of the clothing bank. Pawing through stuff in the clothing bank, Friday kept kiddingly proffering me articles of female clothing: "Bra? You need a bra? How about a pair of girl's panties?" "Maybe," I said, going along with it, "but how do you know they're girl's panties?" "They're padded in the front," he said, "see?" "Oh my God," I said, seeing. Then after I put my clothes in the drier, I walked around the center, it being a heart-meltingly lovely day, and noticed hop-scotch squares marked in chalk on the sidewalks, and it occurred to me that I had no idea--had never had any idea--what they were for.

I've been posting to ColumnbianTalk.com-discussion--wrestling, so to speak, in the agora with all and sundry, dumb and smart and in-between. It's been time-consuming, and, withal, rather pointless, discovering (what was scarcely a surprise) that peoples' wits are inversely proportional to the vehemence of their utterance.

Life at the Palace A three-inch tall figurine of Dopey sits on the left of my monitor, a well-thumbed copy of Tom Sawyer on the right--for the vacancies and interstices of my thought. Friday and Orlando are spending the night with me, unbeknownst, of course, to the hotel management. I feel quite a lot consciously like a Spiritual Franciscan, maybe frate Egidio. I also feel a lot moved-in upon. But having it to give, means being obliged to give it--cheerfully. That's what Messer santo Francesco said. Even if it is technically illegal--and that might have been a thorny question even for St. Francis the Galahad of Christ: a doing good and a providing for the wants of our fellow men which is, technically, illegal. It's a nettle which has, as I see it, to be firmly yet gingerly grasped. Friday understands the delicacy of my situation (if I'm busted, harbouring the homeless, I'm out on my booty), and does what he can not to make me complicit, by just showing up at my door having already signed both in and out under the negligent conciergeship of a sympathetic night deskclerk; sometimes, as in this case, bringing a similarly needy friend with him. Convenient for me or not, legal or not, succour so graciously besought cannot be refused.

My friends--some of whom I've known for more than forty years, a dozen or two people, only one of whom is Christian--are worried that I might, so late in life, be converting to Christianity. Well, it might ease my atheist friends' minds to know that what I am only lately coming to realize that I am, is a Gnostic Ebionite, and a great enemy of that virulent fraud and apostate, Saul of Tarsus, known as the Apostle Paul. Not really that I care, it just happens to be so. I hadn't bothered to check out Gnosticism until just this evening, when I started Googling "Jesus only man," a tenet of the Humanism (however you define it, so long as it includes animals and extra-terrestrials) which is my religion if I have one. And there it was, along with just about everything else that I truly, deeply believe. We Gnostic Ebionites, for example, believe that the only part of the Bible worth squat is the Book of Matthew--and only parts of that; actually, the first part mostly, including the Sermon on the Mount. That we very much believe in, not because it's God's word, but because it's morally and ethically true--the 'Dharma,' as Buddhists say. We don't at all worship Jesus, but we do love and revere him. And that's rather odd, because most of us are way more intellectually sophisticated than he is (or was); but love and seeing with the heart are what it's all about with Jesus. We believe/feel that the crude, self-serving Pauline insistence on Jesus' being God and Saviour sadly disserves his real, noble human nature. And besides, having consciences, we Gnostic Ebionites are not particularly interested in Salvation.

Now, when I say that I hate all the many tedious thousands of pages of all the works of J.K. Rowling, I say so while only actually having read, in all, about four, possibly five, pages. I can do this, and be tolerably certain that I'm still being fair to Ms. Rowling's dreadful prolixity, because the random sampling of what I have read was so bloody stupid and awful (as before described), that it is impossible that the rest of 'Harry Potter' could be any better or different: You don't have to eat the whole fish to know it's rotten. This goes, of course, for all bad writing, but especially, and in spades, for bad female writing.

The View from the Quai Voltaire

Books I hate: All the Harry Potter novels: Firstly, for the hapless "Cockney" (British lower middle class; or, it could be, simply, British sub-literate middle class--In dealing with the profoundly hideous British class-system, we [Thank God Almighty!] class-less Americans often confuse the British middle and lower classes, simply because the British middle classes and their usages are, if anything, uglier than the specifically lower classes beneath them--) dialect that the clueless authoress can't help but write them in, it being her native parlure.  Secondly, for the utter incapacity of the authoress, personally, to imagine or create a fictional world-in-itself or characters (especially male characters) which are not shallow, cardboard projections of her own dull and rather unpleasant personality.

Music I hate: Broadway musicals: If someday when I die, I wake up and find that I'm not dead after all, and somewhere someone is singing "Climb every Mountain"--then I'll know I'm in Hell. Mexican and Irish folk music: It's a toss-up which of those two nationalities is the more unmusical, or has the worse sense of pitch or rhythm. Blues: Pathos without dignity, obscene and abject, concerning the sexual frustration of a Black man with a woman who is not his mother, whom he calls 'momma,' or of a Black woman (even nastier, but usually better humored) wanting 'sugar' (semen) in her 'bowl' ('hole,' vagina); precious, ignorant, self-congratulatory blather about 'blues notes' (false relations). Hip Hop. Rap. Rachmaninoff. All 19th century ballet music except Tchaikovsky. 50's pop tunes: 'April Love,' 'How much is that Doggie in the Window,' etc. Bagpipes. Grunge. Heavy Metal. Lizst. Meyerbeer. Verdi before Falstaff. Ponchielli. Punk. Von Suppe'. Von Weber. Glass. Bernstein. Chopin's orchestral music. Country Western. Hillbilly fiddle-playing. Vatican II tunes. 'Fiddler on the Roof': deserves its own special category of smarmy, cutesy, ethnic loathsomeness.

The View from the Quai Voltaire
Extrait des 'Memoires' de J. Anatole Noziere

There is no modest way to relate the events of my eleventh, 'heroic,' year. I was a genius by then, and knew it. Although if God had granted me an older sister, instead of making me the despotic older child, I imagine she would have said, "He's not really a genius, he just acts like one." I was beginning to understand how free an agent I was, and how little authority I had to yield to; realising that in most situations I could rely on my wits, and make-do with last-minute, seat-of-my-pants improvisation, preserving and augmenting my personal freedom, while getting in many a jibe at the soft underbelly of conventional moralistic decorum. My greatest shot, and the one that upset the greatest number of people, was refusing baptism in the Lamont Free Methodist Church.

After all, it was a Mephistophelean sort of bargain: During Lent, the scant dozen children in the Sixth Grade of the Lamont Public Grade School who were, or who were intended to be, Free Methodists--nearly all of them--were given Wednesday afternoons off from school to attend catechism classes in the Methodist church taught by Mr. Hamlin, the Methodist Minister. At the end of Lent, on Easter Sunday, the deal was, we would be baptised and become Christians. I paid attention, read the material, and argued hard every point that was proposed. By the fifth Wednesday, I had taken my position: I did not agree that I was sinful by nature, that I needed, or wanted, Salvation, or that Jesus would be my preferred Saviour if I did need or want it. I had had my five Wednesday afternoons off to talk theology, but I was done with it. I was annoyed therefore, contemptuous and incredulous, when on the sixth and last Wednesday before Easter, Mr Hamlin reverted insistently to the topic of our "need" for Salvation. Sweetly, looking right over me, he invited us to raise our hands for Jesus, and ask Him to accept our gift of Contrition in exchange for His gift of Salvation.

It took my classmates a few seconds to realize what was being asked of them; but I knew immediately what he meant (I had smelled it coming), and I was the first to raise my hand: I laid out my case, as above; perorating that, given the choice, I would by much prefer Apollo to Jesus. Foolishly, Mr. Hamlin tried to argue with me--and lost every throw. I shall remember as long as I live the look of baffled fury on his face when I asked him tauntingly just what sins he thought that I, as an eleven-year-old boy, might need saving from. "Pride," he finally croaked. And I replied, for I was angry, and quick, "Pride is a virtue, not a sin!" Then with brusque impatience, motioning me to silence, he addressed the rest of the class: Would they, at least, put aside the foolishness of this world and accept Jesus into their hearts? And lo! his humiliation was complete. Because my fellow classmates had been listening to the foregoing confrontation on the Hill of Mars, and like good Athenians were persuaded by what they thought the better argument--mine. One by one, they were singled out by Mr. Hamlin and besought to abjure apostasy and accept baptism; and one by one, though blushing from the extortion being practised on them, they refused, citing my arguments ("like Anatole said") as the reason for their refusal. I was as astonished as Mr. Hamlin to hear it. I won't say that it didn't gratify me to know that my fellow sufferers agreed with me, but it had never occurred to me that they might. In the end there were no pubescent children baptised that Easter in the Lamont Free Methodist Church--and it raised an enormous stink throughout that remote, strait-laced corner of Whitman County. Word of the mass apostasy of the Lamont Methodist Catechism class, spread like wildfire as far as Hooper, St. John, Endicott. Perhaps understandably, the mothers of my fellow apostates were furious. A couple of them made peremptory phonecalls to my mother, demanding that she do something with me; which rather put her back up, but she answered patiently, "I'm sorry, but I can't do anything with Anatole. He knows his own mind."

I enjoyed being a Cub Scout. Though Cub Scouts don't, or didn't then, actually do anything, the meetings were non-taxing and well supplied with cookies and punch. I read the Cub Scout Manual with great delight--planning for the day when I would make my own crystal radio set, and go into the woods laying snares and death-traps for birds, rabbits, and deer. It seemed inevitable that as I matured I would go on to join the Boy Scouts like all my friends did. And these were the Fifties, heyday of the pedophile Scout Leader: I knew, for my friends whispered to me of what really went on on those Boy Scout sleep-overs and Jamborees, that it was all one continuous intergenerational same-sex orgy--and yet I hesitated, and in the end declined, to become a Boy Scout. And the reason was that I could not, and would not, do any damned thing, much less my "duty," for "God and Country."


Extrait des Memoires d'Anatole Noziere--premieres Lectures

Seven years old

I was lucky--first wave Baby Boomer, remember?--to have parents who saw in me the fulfillment of a generational destiny which they believed to be magically different from any that had ever existed before. It was my mother and my father, therefore, who really taught me to read; saved for me the favorite books from their childhood, and from that of their parents-- McGuffey Readers, Tales of the Teepee, Grimms' Faerey Tales, The Story of a Grizzly--and helped me puzzle through them, patiently explaining the words I didn't know, encouraging me to take books with me wherever I went, to read myself to sleep at night, and to lie on my bed whenever I wanted in the daytime to read. So it happened that at the age of seven I sat under a tree in the yard and read, in an old McGuffey Reader inherited from a grandparent, a dumbed-down version of the Phaedo. Socrates's speculations on the immortality of the soul lit a fire in my infant heart and brain that I'm sure my parents could not have guessed. And I knew instinctively not to tell them of it. I walked as in a trance back into the house, making sure that I was alone, and got a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and held it with both hands by the handle, point-first against my chest just below the sternum, and contemplated throwing myself forward...I didn't, of course, but I thought about it, in a way that would have scared my poor parents to death. It scares me now, almost, to think how close I came....How I knew to adopt the classic antique Roman posture for throwing oneself on one's sword I have no idea. Only reincarnation (my mother told me a dozen years later that she "remembered" having been my daughter back in the days when I was a Roman Senator) could account for it. But instinctually knowing how, as a noble Roman aristocrat (I don't think plebeians were ever called on to do it) to kill myself, is the only vestige of that life that I distinctly recall.


Eight years old

I discovered the Arabian Nights. In those days there was no damned useless intrusive 'Princess Jasmine,' just a sort of generic Sultan's Daughter who gets dragged in at the very end--after Aladdin and the Genie have got their important central relationship worked out, palaces built, unpleasantness over the Egg of the Roc smoothed over--as a kind of official signatory of the Sultan's satisfaction with his handsome, clever, rich and powerful son-in-law.


nine years old

I began reading simplified histories of Greece and Rome; with particular attention to the bad, or wicked, Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula being my overall favorites. That same year Hollywood issued one of its more dreadful historical pastiches, Quo Vadis, in which the brilliant young Peter Yustinov gave the performance of his lifetime as my old hero Nero. As J-J Rousseau does say, give a kid a chance and he'll pick a villain for a hero anytime. So it was with me: When Yustinov as Nero kicked his empress Poppaea in the stomach, I cheered. When he used Christians as human torches and fed them to the lions, I applauded. And when he brought out a little crystal vial to catch his imperial tears when he wept--and the audience around me laughed derisively--I wept with him. I never really fell out of love with Peter Yustinov after that, and he was certainly to the end of his days a most admired wit and racconteur.


ten years old

And so we come to that biggest of all big moments in any man's life: when he first ejaculates. Mary Smick was the most delightful of my mother's friends, and her husband Del was far and away the handsomest, and maybe the nicest, man in the hamlet of Lamont. Between them they had three wonderfully various children: David, two years younger than me, already as handsome as his father and as full of espieglerie as his mother, the only boy younger than myself that I ever liked; Neil, my age, full of charm, wit, and taunting, cruel beauty such that I trembled in his presence, half afraid of him, and more than half in love with him; Melanie, virtually a clone of her mother (skinny, angular, charming), a year or two older than me, and, though a girl, I quite liked her and enjoyed talking with her. Mary Smick was the librarian of the local library--as large as the town of Lamont, pop. 538, could afford--a smallish room upstairs in the back of my uncle Byron's grocery/drygoods store, open two days a week, from one to five O' clock in the afternoon. Mary therefore knew quite a bit about me, because of the books--histories of Greece and Rome, books on art and architecture--that I checked out and that she would always tell my mother (when they met at Wednesday night Methodist prayer meetings) about, when it was time to return them. So it happened one day in May of my tenth year when I showed up as usual at her tiny library that Mary Smick said she had a book for me that she knew I would "just love." It was The Athenian, and indeed I did love it. Gore Vidal mentions the book in his memoirs with something of the same nostalgia and utter smittenness that it still evokes in me--and also says that, like me, he has never been able to find it since, and cannot remember who the author was. Ah, well. As I shall never forget, it is the story of a boy (Demetrius?--yes) whose father is Athenian and whose mother, a Spartan, when the boy's father dies, takes the boy, aged seven, back to Sparta to be raised a companion in arms of King Leonidas, and sweetly and decorously to die with 299 others fighting a rearguard action against the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. O manly valour! Not so much of a speed reader then as I am now, I remember starting to read it after supper in the living room, and, after a chapter or two extolling the beauty and the love of beauty of an Athenian boy raised among strength-and-beauty loving Spartans, I realized that this was way too hot to be reading en famille, with my mother right there for Christ's sakes; so I retired as early as I decently could and read in bed as far as our eponymous hero's return from a consultation with the oracle of Apollo, what time my flesh failed and I fell asleep as though in a fever, waking with my finger on the page just at dawn, to read of the first meeting of Demetrius and his youthful shield-bearer-to-be: being strung up and flogged, as it happened, by the frenzied, ugly, weak and wicked devotees of Artemis. Our hero does not hesitate: Though they are many and evil, and our hero but a single beautiful nineteen year old male, he wades into them like a refining fire, utterly routing them, and unbinds the fair youth, embracing and comforting and tending to his wounds (none too serious), and leads him away to their glorious future together....And for the first time in my life, my dick which I was scarcely aware of fingering, erupted with two or three drops of totally unexpected pearly ejaculate, and I was filled with extasy. I rested for half an hour or so and tried it again--same text, same result. And again. By the time my mother called me to get up and get ready for school, I was in a state of rapture and quiet delirium that did not go unnoticed. After breakfast, I went into the living room and knelt in front of the couch with my hands folded in front of me, staring into the vast abyss of pleasure and desire within myself. In which attitude my mother found me long after I should have been out the door and headed towards school; and of course she did what she could to spoil it for me: "What's the matter with you? Why aren't you out of the house yet? Are you sick? You act sick. You want me to take your temperature?" Which, when I think about it, is how she had reacted to the visionary state that the image of Errol Flynn in his galley-slave rowing shorts had thrown me into: Worry that something was wrong with me, and that I must be sick. Mothers know.


eleven years old

Mary Smick again, in her official capacity as my librarian, obtained for me--I'll never know how--through the Inter-Library Loan system, Clive Bell's many-volume History of French Architecture, with all the original elevations and plans of Andre Le Notre, Francois and Jules-Hardouin Mansart, Jacques-Anges Gabrielle, etc. Oh God, those Cascades, at St-Cloud and Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Marly-le-Roi; those infinitely inventive Parterres de Broiderie of Le Notre, the exquisite fenestrations of Francois Mansart! I bought rolls of art-paper, scotch-taped them together (for nothing else was large enough) and proceeded to design my own chateaux with surrounding parks, cascades and gardens. The last I saw of my pubescent ventures in real, French architecture in a closet in my parents' house when I was a young man, I was amazed at the heroic scale and diligence of that apprentice self.

I am slightly too old, at sixty-three, to have known, loathed and dreaded them as a boy--but what "cooties" have represented (the vile, contagious creepiness of girls) to all subsequent generations of American boys, was something that I vividly and concretely understood, without the aid of metaphor, by the time I was ten years old. Since when there have been several defining moments in the evolution of my dislike and disdain of the Sex. Once when I was eleven, I came into my sixth-grade school home room, and found a girl cleaning my (admittedly filthy) school desk for me, all unsolicited and as a surprise and a "treat" for me: I went ballistic. "How dare you! Who do you think you are?," etc. I went on for some time ranting and screaming (Who taught me to scream with rage?), and before I was done, the imprudent, presumptuous girl had fled in tears. Then, after an awful silence, another girl spoke up in defence of the first, saying that she had "meant well, and was only trying to do you a favor." So I rounded on her furiously, sending her off in tears too. Then, happily, for the rest of the school year, and for the rest of our lives, I ignored the girls in my class, unless it were to mock and sneer at them. And so the twig was bent; I stll keep a most untidy desk.

The View from the Quai Voltaire

Ah, Turkey. The predatory nation par excellence. I hasten to say that I have never met a Turk I didn't like, and that when I play bridge online, Turks are right up there with Italians as civilized, fun, forgiving bridge-partners. But that said, Turks have done an awful lot of damage in the world. Turks sacked Constantinople (1453), and blew up the Parthenon (1687), albeit with some help from the Venetians in both cases. Their way of dealing with their neighbours has, throughout history, been to enslave and oppress them. Nor has being a Turkish "citizen" and a domestic slave of the Sultan ever been much better, or much different, than being any other sort of slave of the Sultan. Under the old regime, before Ataturk, there were essentially two classes: The Sultan, who was predator; and everybody else, who were prey. It is easy to demonize the Turkish sultanate, because it was in fact a hellish form of government..The spirit of the sultanate still prevails in Turkey...All Ataturk did was put a paper-thin parliamentary facade over the innate Turkish inclination to despotism....

Sad, and funny, and somehow sort of appalling, is the desire of the nation of Turkey to become a recognized member of the European Union. "Well," say France and Austria, "take your military out of your government and out of your judiciary, allow the Kurds to secede from your prison-state, get out of Cyprus, and apologize for the massacre of Armenians (and others), and for the burning of Smyrna--and we'll think about it." They mean: No.

In my view, it's really quite simple:

Dogs that bite should be destroyed. Dogs that are trained to bite (pit bulls and police dogs with names like "Champ" and "Hero") should be destroyed before they bite somebody.

Got an e-mail from Phil (his real name) in Germany a few days ago saying he was liking my 5-part setting of the Ballade des Pendus and wanted to talk about performance difficulties--call him Saturday. I'm going all funny about this. I had forgot that Phil even had a copy of it, and here he is talking about performance. There are damned few 5-part choirs in the world--unless the Pope's castrati have moved to the Netherlands--that could sing the bare notes of this strange funeral piece. But if they have, and they want to stand up in public and sing it, I sure won't prevent it. Then of course, if and when my stuff gets performed and I become famous, my real identity will be revealed, and I will lose my much valued anonymity. Spero di no--but it could happen. Till then, I will ruminate, and lucubrate, as I please, as 'Anatole.'

The View from the Quai Voltaire

I am proud to be: a "Duck," graduate of the University of Oregon; and a "Cascadian," native of the Pacific Northwest. I am not proud to be an "Amerikan," which I spell with a "k," as do many of us typically hyper-literate Cascadians. I am proud not to be, and never to have been, a Christian, Boy Scout, or member of the Armed Services. I don't lie, or keep secrets (for other people), and I don't (know how to) take orders. In general, I consider myself (and my friends, who are other selves) to be above any law which presumes to govern my private, sexual behaviour, or to regulate what substances I choose to ingest. I keep it short, and simple, and I do pretty much as I please--except for the constant hypocritical Amerikan hassle of not getting caught. But of course, I stand on the shoulders of giants (Diogenes, Thoreau, Chuang Tzu, etc.): The view from up here is terrific.

The View from the Quai Voltaire FAQ

Who is 'Friday' and what is he about? Friday is a homeless Moon child, born in the Sixties at the end of June, a crustacean without his shell, an absent and an anxious father, a meth addict, a street person. He is my friend, my counselor, and sometimes my hairshirt and scourge, as thin-skinned, needy friends are wont to be. He frequently scolds me--it seems to be a sore point with him--for allowing my intellect to make me arrogant and supercilious; because, I think, he wants nothing superior in his life to his own numinous Cancerian intuition. I confound him by agreeing with him (Cancer is my rising sign--though my sun sign be Virgo, all brain and no heart): I do, in all conscience, allow myself a lot of lattitude in the arrogance/disdain department; but not, I hope and believe, towards friends and equals. Which little speech, when I make it, sets him off like a rocket.