"The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils...."

The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus.  Let no such man be trusted."


The thing is, to those "fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils," music isn't anything, nor can they imagine what it could be. Witness Mark Twain on Lohengrin and Nancy Mitford on Das Rheingold. Least of all can they distinguish between music and musicals. As much as the love of Wagner, Gluck, and Mozart puzzles them, they are even more perplexed by a violent aversion to My Fair Lady.

Home, Sweet Home

My Housing Specialist, Alvin, at the Criminal Shelter had me in to his office yesterday morning to tell me that there's a studio apartment virtually with my name on it a block from the university, which I'm to see him further about Monday, and then go look at myself, hopefully to rent, with all utilities included, for $172 (30% of my monthly SSI stipend). I won't believe it, really and truly, till I see it and talk to the landlady....

Meantime, as I type, I see that my "shamaan," Melchior (alias Mentor, "because there are no ell or kay sounds in my language") has come into the Science and Technology section of the main library and is wandering around looking for me. I'll go find him on the lanai, I expect, and see what he's up to. Lately he's been making plans to go to Rome to beard the Pope in his lair and ask him, "What has happened to the Catholic Church?" I tell him, "Don't bother. It's a long way to go to talk to a dumb, tactless little Nazi who has neither the brains nor the command of English to understand your question. Anything that he could tell you you already know." Still, like many another Catholic, he can't quite bring himself to believe that his Holy Father is, for all practical purposes, the Anti-Christ.

[Re-]reading Kipling since yesterday, Kim and the Jungle Books. The resemblance between the former and Huckleberry Finn is certainly obvious, once you're on to it. Nice to know and to think about Kipling and Mark Twain knowing and admiring one another and getting their honorary degrees from Oxford at the same time.

From the Hamilton Library on the campus of UH, all thought of the Criminal Shelter and my attachments, even loves, here foregone. I'm reading miscellanies of Nancy Mitford, her newspaper columns, letters, etc. Bright Young Thing (born 1904) that she was, couldn't very well help being--and chain-smoking, smart-ass foe of the Rococo (indifferent to Haydn and Mozart, much less Boccherini, Gluck or Viotti)--still, she knew of the value of Mesdames de la Fayette and de la Tour du Pin, and she had instincts, and considerable knowledge of the French people, their history and culture. Her tart summation of the quarrel between Cocteau and Mauriac, with its final devastating epithet "inculture," is better (wittier, having a firmer grasp of the issues) than either of them could have come up with....

So here I am, on the UH campus--on th'Aonian Mount--revelling in the pure Parnassian, plumeria- scented air, so different in glorious summer from odorless, sad winter; thinking: This can, and should be, my home. I think I just will go round to the graduate student advisory center and get advised, maybe registered. And just as I'm thinking these normal, happy, natural thoughts, there slithers in front of me, right across the room in front of the circulation and information desk, one of the sickest and stupidest of the sick, stupid denizens of that very homeless shelter which I have been so exultant at having left far, far benind me: "Mme. Butterfly" we call him on account of his gross, unclean, arachnoid effeminacy, and his habit of fanning himself, like a revenant from the Scopes trial, with a paper fan. What is one so vile, so poisonous, so sub-literate (he speaks, croaks, hisses only in the most debased local creole dialect) doing here in the ivory tower? Cruising the men's rooms, I can only suppose.

But onward. I finished LIACC yesterday, glad I had waited to read in its proper sequence the first and subsequent meetings of Cedric Hampton and Lord and Lady Montdore, so wonderfully, as I shall never forget, portrayed by Vivian Pickles on PBS [1989? I thought it had been earlier].

In the library now this late morning, using the one of the computers in the Science and Technology "work-station," a garrulous old man (perhaps ten years older than me, perhaps less) is plaguing the section-attendant librarian with research that he had better have done himself, with ceaseless, full-voice, friendless old man's garrulity, maddeningly distracting. I've shushed him several times--and he cannot hear me, or cannot believe that he is being shushed. Oh God, deliver me from the appalling fate of becoming what he [and most of my coevals] is [are]! If ever ever I show the least sign of garrulity, or a pathetic desire just to turn the television way up and watch Lawrence Welk, O Lord, in thy infinite mercy, push me in front of a truck.

Having read The Pursuit of Love (finished on the the bus on the way here [the Kaimuki library] this morning), I've begun Love in a Cold Climate (in the same volume); much bemused by the [usual, standard] critical assessments [which I always like to sample when I begin a famous book]of the former as "more sentimental, and less cynical" than the latter. Like I care: I'm waiting, with bated breath and barely restrained impatience [promising myself that I will not spoil the artful pacing of Ms. Mitford's exposition by skipping ahead], for the appearance of Cedric and his captivation of Aunt Sadie, who was played by the divine Vivian Pickles in the television version of LIACC--Lo! it must have been twenty-seven or more years ago.

I pause now to moot and puzzle over the friendship,evidently sincere, between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Could it be that EW had qualities that weren't vitiated by his appalling snobbery and heartless egotism? I dread having to go looking for them. Why may I not say with a civil enough leer that I loved The Loved One, without feeling in the least inclined to like its author, and certainly not at all disposed to plunge into the tortured toadyism of Brideshead Revisited (whose real-life "Sebastian," as I happen to know, despised the non-fictional Waugh every bit as much as I do, and for the same reasons)?

I have not read Brave New World; neither am I likely to. Otherwise, I'm fairly deep in the works and thought of Aldous Huxley; prizing above all his many wonderful little monographs (essays, if you will) on anything and everything that occurs to him, but also liking extremely: After many a Summer Dies the Swan, Crome Yellow, Eyeless in Gaza, and of course, The Doors of Perception. I've tried several times to read BNW; invariably giving up somewhere between the twentieth and the fortieth pages--unable to bear the ugliness of its premises: Why not make everybody Alpha++'s? What is this notion of the inevitablity and desirability of class? Derived as it palpably is from the world's first and deadliest dystopia (Plato's Republic), why not "consign it to the flames therefore," as the stupid, utterly unprofitable bad idea that it is and always has been? So I missed how Huxley creates his gamma and epsilon classes by slightly poisoning their developing fetuses in vitro with alcohol. Both Douglas and Timothy, severally determined to fill this gap in my reading, have both been coming up to me lately expostulating on the wicked wisdom of this tiresome classic of modern literature. And so I have learned that Huxley understood all about the social significance of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome--and the creation of the witless Lower Classes--in a lucid, scientific way which Williams Hogarth and Blake had only known empirically and intuitively. But there it is: The line direct, from the gin-swilling whores of 18th Century London to Benny Hill.

Reading (just come to me through the inter-island library loan system): In Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate; prosecuting, that is to say, my in-depth researches in queer history--which is also the reason I ordered (through the same loan system) Rising Tide. The little glimpses that both Mme. Mitford and Mr. Barry give us, through the unsuspecting, though sometimes murderously punitive, close-wrought grid of heterosexual tyranny--in England as in New Orleans--of an underlying gay reality, are slashingly vivid, provocative; sickening in their suggestion of bitter oppression, exhilarating in their glorious, indominatable defiance of what is so unreflectingly considered by the vulgar many to be "the way things are."

Having, by means actionable and therefore unmentionable, got the use of a fully charged cell phone (cosi` si chiama), I've been reaching out and touching the folks in Spokane: Patty night before last; Kristen, Marianne, Annie, Ham, and Gloria yesterday; Marcus this morning, on my here, under the banyan trees in a corner of the Iolani Palace grounds--the last still reverberating in my head and heart. We all told one another how good we all sounded, exchanged hot titbits of gossip, news, and (in the last case) recommendations of music (Saint-Saens' "Wedding Cake," for piano and orchestra--"as delicious," advised Marcus, "as Tchaikovsky's 'December' from 'The Seasons). How it eases, how it pleases to hear those voci care.

Up betimes at the homeless shelter, being flat broke still, and not wishing to ask Douglas to give me coffee again for the second morning in a row--at least, not to wake him (for he slept still the sleep of the just) to ask him to do so--I went immediately across the street to K-Mart, where I got on the computer (their Net Nanny will not permit me to blog) and played a couple of games of chess on the Postcard Chess computer, losing the first ignominiously, winning gloriously the second. Then, feeling good about myself, I went and found Douglas at the Korean Korner Koffee Kup and had him buy me a cup of coffee while I explained to him the spirit and the significance of the Rococo. I am to meet him here at the main library sometime this morning, and if we find a quiet nook where we can talk, I propose to lead him through the historical stages of that kindliest, wittiest, and most musical flowering of the human spirit, from its first appearance in a mirror over a fireplace in the chateau of Versailles of Louis XIV, to its murder under the knife of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror of Robespierre et Cie.

Reading lately: an infinitely fascinating, exquisitely well written book, called Rising Tide, by one (meaning that I, in my ignorance) have never heard of him before) John M. Barry, about: the (whole vast subject of the) Mississippi River, its physical and spiritual nature; the jetties and levees which contain it, and the bridges over it, and the men who built them; and, specifically, the Great Flood of 1927. The subject, though vast, is perfectly marshalled, mastered and coordinated by the author in a manner somehow reminiscent of Moby Dick--without the blowhard hoohah. This book is also, more obviously, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, both of which I have read so many times as virtually to have memorized them, and which float through my reading of this like the ghosts of sidepaddler riverboats, elegant as swans, fulgurant with showers of sparks, trailing black clouds of pitchpine smoke.

Speaking seriously with young (two thirds my age) Douglas about life and death, I said, "I wonder when I will begin to feel old? Really, to do all the things I want to do in this life, I need to live another sixty-five years...My intention, when I die, is to remember all that I am and ever have been, and to reincarnate, say, several hundred years hence, when the perfection of cosmetic surgery and anti-agathic medicine will make it possible to live for millennia as a twenty-three year old...." I did not further burden my interlocutor with the full extent of my plans for that distant but diamond-clear future, but I will here state that my twin goals in that life will be (1) to explore the universe, and (2) to re-create the lost works of Boccherini, Albinoni, and, of course, Mozart (or to supply, in the latter case, some of what we might suppose him to have written had he lived to be as old as his friend Haydn); and I expect to accomplish these goals simply and essentially by near-light-speed inter-stellar space travel--accelerating to mid-trajectory, and decelerating the rest of the way; in a judicious and careful manner seeking novelty, while not losing touch with the humanist civilization of which I intend (as I do in this life) to be the representative exemplar and original source. What else, I figure, do we have to contribute to galactic civilization (than art, music, ethics, and comedy)?

Sitting on the upstairs lanai at the library this morning with Douglas, him reading War and Peace; me reading What Ho! Jeeves and listening to Rene' Jacobs "countertenor" (I'd call him a high contralto) sing the title role of Alessandro. I gave Douglas the earphones and had him listen too. He sat bemused through it, and handing the earphones back, said, "Now I see why you are so indignant and disgusted with modern popular music: It's like you live in the Louvre."

Reading: Science Fiction; nearly done with Firbank--laughed just once, towards the end of Valmouth, but frequently smirked and sometimes tittered. I've determined to set to music the poem on page sixty of Valmouth ("Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses/ Ne reviendra plus a` ce printemps-ci, Etc."). Which, no doubt, Faure and Debussy have already done--but I think I can make it pretty (giving it a natural, sweet, singable tune); which I am sure those sour, dry unromantics would not, could not, have done, out of their morbid Gallic fear of doing anything at all pleasant and obvious. Look at what Debussy, for example, did to Charles d'Orle'ans' "Le Temps a laisse' son Manteau/ De Vent de Froidure et de Pluie," with its fussy, anachronistic "swooshy" pianistic watery sounds in the accompaniment (cheap shot), and compare it to the ever so much more melodious, slightly jazzy [7/8 meter] little monodic jewel that I confected of it--with all the "effects," of wetness and beasts crying, coming directly out of the tune itself. Which do you think the father of Louis XII and sometime patron of Francois Villon would've preferred? I ask you.

Well! As I continue to take delicious, guilty pleasure in the camp "novels" of Ronald Firbank--starting anew on Valmouth since yesterday--Douglas spent the night away from the shelter, presumably with the beautiful young Jeremy; presumably [as one of our resident, rather too interested, tatty queens put it, "Well, if he's] doing Jeremy[, I want to be next].["] Run, Jeremy, run! Meantime, too, I've been having fun little talks with Timothy, pointing out that his e-mail "relationship" with the woman he married once, for two days, five years ago, is "playing tennis with the net down." The lovely thing about Timothy is that once he fields one of my zingers, and starts laughing, he can't stop, until he jollies himself right into good sense.

I have always--always--been the androphile*, and addict of androphiliac pornography, that I am. Proof of this is my memory, at the age of five years old, of attending with my parents a showing of The Sea Hawk, starring the radiantly beautiful, thrillingly well hung, Errol Flynn. We sat in the balcony, with me in the aisle seat, my mother next to me, and my father next over. It was the sort of adventurous, swashbuckling movie, with a an adventurous, swashbuckling, good-looking hero, that already I preferred to anything else, even to Disney animations (though Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror's Apprentice would have been a close call). I was, happily, immersed in it, valuing the valor and the intrepidity of the heroic Mr. Flynn--when suddenly he was captured, somehow divested of most of his clothes, and set cruelly, with blows of the lash and villainous abuse, to rowing a galley. The enormity of his evil fate was revealed when, suddenly, capriciously, he was ordered to stop rowing, and lay sweaty, unshaven, and utterly lovely in his rowing shorts, across his oar, panting for breath. In a flash, I perceived what had escaped the notice of the Hays Office and (at least consciously) my parents: With every labored breath that he took, his large virile member (as was later attested to by Truman Capote**) strained against his rowing shorts in an entrancing fashion. I quite forgot to breathe--Suddenly, like an angry cobra, came the urgent hissing of my mother: "Stop squirming!" Then for the first time I wished my parents dead. Leaving the theater after the movie, I walked ahead, eyes half-closed, holding within myself the vision of Errol Flynn in his rowing shorts, and without a word climbed into the back seat of the four-door Packard sedan and lay down. Suddenly my mother's hand was on my brow, and she was saying, "What's the matter with you? Have you got a fever? You're acting strange, like you're sick or something." And for the first time ever, the very mature thought occurred to me that I wanted to strangle my mother with a knotted stocking.

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* The word androphilia, so far as I ever knew, was my own invention when I started writing this day's blog. Subsequent research (Googling) on the internet has revealed that others--namely, Jack Malebranche--have used it before me, with approximately my own meaning; though without the implicit intentional contrast with the word "pedophilia," suitable to my falling in lust at the age of five remarkably precocious years with a thirty-something year old man.

** Saying that anything was "attested to" by Truman Capote (one of the world's most notorious pathological liars) is, of course, a contradiction in terms. Moreover, the incident alluded to (Capote's performing fellatio on Flynn) is improbable on several counts: As is well known, Flynn, though several times married to women, and considered by everyone who knew him a lady-killer par excellence, preferred strong, good-looking, masculine men of approximately the same age as himself as friends, roommates, and (in the Australian sense) "mates"--that is, as his emotional complements. It is unlikely that the swishy, epicene Capote could have got close enough to Flynn, at any age, to have engaged in any kind of sexual activity with him--or that Flynn would have enjoyed it if he had. Fortunately, there are other sources which validate my boyish estimation of his "endowment," including the certainly true statement of Errol Flynn himself that he had been asked to "tape down" his genital prominence, and that he had--and always would--refuse to do so.

Reading Gore Vidal's most recent memoir (through 2006), Point to Point Navigation. Lots of sweet stuff in it; the funniest being, so far, (1) Barbara Cartland's arriving inexcusably late at a Siamese princess's reception, and being punished by the princess for it, (2) Eleanor Roosevelt's passion for Amelia Earhart, (3) Pius XII's botched embalming.

Still thinking how odd it is, that, with all the wonder and mystifaction surrounding the acknowledged perfection of Stradivarius violins (violas and violoncellos), nobody has thought to make a connection between when they were made, and the music they were made for.

On the front page of the newspaper today: New study proves that men and women talk the same amount--with differences, of course, in impersonality/objectivity vs. personality/subjectivity. Buried mid-way through the article was the observation that the belief that women talk more (and by implication more fluently) was, to begin with, the deliberate canard of a certain female-of-course "psychologist" [Louann Brizendine, authoress of "The Female Brain"] bolstering her silly-ass thesis of female superiority; which was repeated thence as scientific truth by those of similar bias [most of the "profession"].

Recently read: Colette's Chéri; lots more ghost stories. Now I've checked out an anthology of five of Ronald Firbank's novels (Valmouth, The Flower beneath the Foot, Prancing Nigger, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, The Artificial Princess), with an introduction by Osbert Sitwell [camp calling unto camp], two of which (Valmouth and Prancing Nigger) I remember having read before. As I understand from the Wikipedia article on our favourite author, he wasn't kidding when he tried to get himself drafted in World War I--he was, like oh so many other idiots of his class and contemporaneity, an idiotically sincere patriot, who was trying, with no ironic intent, to "do his bit." Faugh. Bertrand Russell was apparently one of the few with brains enough to be a pacifist--and he wasn't smart enough to stay out of jail.