A couple of weeks ago, while I still had money in the bank, I went online and bought Charles Nelson's The Boy who Picked the Bullets up, on the strength of the same author's Panthers in the Skins of Men which had excited and entranced me--best investment I ever made. A totally wonderful, totally validating, totally my kind of book. Criticism seems to be scarce. Only Ethan Mordden, in his introduction to a collection of gay short stories entitled Waves, seems to have any idea of the significance of Nelson's work. Nobody that I know of has any understanding of his basic, paradoxical [Gay] Moral Sanity. Certainly not (I'll bet my jewels) the New York Times.

From Reynold Price's+ introduction to Larry Kramer's Faggots:

....anyone who experienced, or closely observed the American and Euyropean male homosexual revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s can confirm an all but incredible fact. Kramer's account of American queer culture in those years is far more nearly literal history than heightened reality....the frenzied sexual activity which the male body so readily proved capable of performing made the stated goal (1) of much of that activity literally impossible--if the goal, that is, was love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable vigor.
....whatever prodigies the male genitals can perform, the human mind is incapable of emotional focus (2) when it's asked to experience so much emotional intensity with so many different objects. And when orgasmic sex ceases to constitute emotional intensity for its participants, then what remains in the realm of sensory possibility for the deadened veteran--human torture, murder, the consumption of children? Beneath Kramer's...denunciation of mindlesss male promiscuity...lies the seed of both his revulsion and his dread.
...The human body..is unspeakably fragile. [In fact the body neither forgets nor forgives] excess. Brain cells are destroyed or muted by alcohol and other toxic chemicals...Unchecked male sexual performance, once past the the phenomenal power of adolescence, has now been proven to demand irreplaceable expenditures of mental and physical energy (3) far past the warnings of the direst priest or evangelist.
...Burdened (4) by numbers and by detachment from person-to-person attention and care, the sexual body will sooner or later turn against the mind that propels it and reduce that mind to some less desirable thing. At the least it reduces men to metallic click-off counters of cocks-or-cunts experienced; at the worst to subhuman predators of random flesh.
...all unshielded sexual contact of whatever kind may...be assumed to be potentially lethal. Western humanity knew that fact for nearly five centuries from the arrival of syphilis until its partial control by penicillin in the mid-1940s. [The most phlegmatic virologists tell us that] the willfulness of the vast and still-lurking world of microbes must never hereafter be ignored.
...homosexual adventurousness on an epic and self-entrapped scale is foolish or wrong (5)....


Let me first say that I agree with none of Reynold Price's opinions; that I find them smugly, condescendingly, presumptuously, infuriatingly--heterosexually--wrong and wrong-headed; that contained within this pompous, evasive and cowardly prolixity is just about everything that I most hate about heterosexuals and their so nauseatingly complacent assurance that they, after all, are the repositors of Conventional Wisdom, Wise because they are Conventional, and Conventional because they are Wise. I refute it thus:

1. There was no "goal" to all that "frenzied" (would you believe "ecstatic"?) homosexual activity. It was done for its own sake, for the pleasure it gave. Period. Women, or the straight or effeminate men who resemble them, might suppose that "love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable (?!) vigor" had been the "goal" of homosexual activity--but, trust me, men--real, gay men--had no such expectations. That was the fun of it. And fun it was.

2. "Emotional focus"? What the fuck does that mean? Whatever, if you don't have it you lose "intensity," and when you lose that, naturally, you turn to sadism, murder, and cannibalism (God I hate heterosexuals!)--an opinion which is reiterated in terms scarcely different as "click-off counters--or subhuman predators."

3. Nothing of the sort has been at all proven.

4. Large numbers of sexual partners (What else could he mean?) and detachment from one-on-one attention and care are a burden to the "sexual body"? Women, I suppose, and pussy-men probably do think something like that; and probably they think that men would think so too, if only they weren't men, and therefore, by definition, incapable of understanding themselves...But why, granted that men from that dip-shit* female perspective are nothing more than click-off counters ("mere" hobbyists--as if any woman ever understood how much a man's hobbies are his passions) or predators of random flesh--why are they "subhuman" predators?

5. I can't think of a single reason why homosexual adventurousness on an epic scale might be thought of as "foolish or wrong." To me it sounds like heroic fun**. And I have no idea what is meant by "self-entrapped"--unless it's a sly, pussy-man's way of saying "no consideration for girls." In fact, I suspect that's it.


Really, Price doesn't deserve further analysis. Since I wrote the last paragraph I've done a little research on him and found him to be a much published (1) believing Christian, (2) a devotee of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. If he were a younger fool he'd be into Derrida and Foucault. So the hell with him. And for the matter of that, the hell with Larry Kramer and his seemingly so-prescient novel about male promiscuity, which turns out to've been mere coincidence--The axe he was grinding was jealousy, having just been dropped by his architect boy-friend.



+Troll. See blogs November 28 and December 26, 2007.

* Dip-shit: One who, when given a measuring-stick to measure a certain depth of shit, holds the stick by the wrong end; by extension, a foolish, sentimental person.

** Fun: The answer given by the King of Death to the riddle proposed by a certain, very serious Charioteer, "Why is there anything rather than nothing?"

Total Turn-offs: Vulgarity in Music, Stink in Sex

Music for me began officially when I was eight years old, picking out tunes ('The Tennessee Waltz' was the first) on the piano. Before that, even as a toddler, according to my mother, I had always tried to play the piano--never just banged at it like other kids did. And, of course, as far back as I can remember, I could carry a tune, and loved to sing along with my father, as well as with Dinah Shore and 'smiling' Jack Smith on the radio. So, from the beginning, for me, music was tunes; some of which I liked ('Zippity Doo Dah,' 'When the M-Moon Shines over the Mountain') and was allowed to like, more than others; and some of which I didn't like, and was allowed to punch my father in the shoulder if he persisted in singing them--one about 'rats and cheese' I found particularly creepy, and would beg my father not to sing it; which, of course, he would insist on doing, despite my frantic abuse of his shoulder, I think trying to discover what it was about 'rats and cheese' that I found so offensive. I was never able quite to explain it.

When I was nine, the folks bought a big, sweet, clear-sounding upright piano, and my mother began, in her very own Suzuki Method, to teach me to play it by playing pieces to me out of an anthology of waltzes, printed in diamond-shaped notes with the ink fading to brown, that her mother's mother, my great-grandmother Ellen Moore, had brought West with her in 1859 from Virginia in a covered wagon, and had me play them back by ear--which, astoundingly, I was easily able to do; so learning by heart 'The Mosquito Waltz.' It being thus determined that I had talent, I started taking piano lessons from the widow of the recently deceased Methodist minister, Olive Osbourne, a graduate of Mills College and a former pupil of Darius Milhaud. At my first recital that year, in addition to one of the Bach menuets (which I loved) from Anna Magdalena's Book, I played a piece of my own composition entitled 'To a Waterfall,' because I could think of nothing more beautiful.

It didn't occur to me that I had been and was acquiring taste--my own taste--or that in so doing I was taking giant steps away from the vulgar and tasteless norm. I wasn't trying to prove anything or to be anything other than myself. I loved the music I loved, and hated the music I hated without analyzing it overmuch. When I discovered Mozart, Rameau, Daquin, C.P.E. Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, it was always, as Emily Dickinson said of real poetry, like the top of my head was coming off--ecstasy. When I first heard the Magic Flute on television when I was eleven years old, I was in a state of delirium that lasted nearly twenty-four hours: I couldn't, didn't want to, sleep, playing it over and over in my mind, weeping and trembling in the dark while the music flowed through me. Something similar, though rather more cheerful, came over me when I first heard a Haydn symphony on the radio, dragging me out of my chair and sending me dancing around the room. Conversely, the popular music of the Fifties (Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, musical comedies, Ethel Merman, Gail Storm) made me nearly physically sick with distaste, as did most of the music of the 19th century (Paganini, von Weber, von Suppe', Lizst, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Johann Strauss)--and it still does.

When I would try to explain to myself what it was that I found so offensive in the vast majority of the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, I would find myself repeating again and again, "stupid stupid tunes!" I began to see that what I meant by "stupid" was "vulgar," and it was only much later that I began to understand that there was a real, if metaphoric, connection between the vulgarity which ruined music for me, and certain kinds of stench which, for me, utterly squelched sexual pleasure: shit, smegma, women's perfume. I began to "see" how like cheesey fecal matter are polkas, Pagliacci, "La donna e' mobile," "Dancin' in the Rain"; how like 'Chanel No. 5' and 'Shalimar' are Die Fledermaus and The Sound of Music. Of course, to a Dog on Heat, the smell of shit is half the attraction (if there's enough, he'll eat it); while to a Heterosexual the "smell of a woman" is downright intoxicating; but a Homo Superior finds this gag-reflex insuperable.

My Italian Uncle

des Memoires d'Anatole Noziere



Ray Yusi, of an ancient Italian family, married my father's sister Betty for love; though probably he wouldn't have if she hadn't converted to Roman Catholicism beforehand and promised to have as many children as she could--but that is mere speculation. What is certain is that he loved my aunt Betty and the five children they had together as maybe only those of Latin extraction really ever do. Uncle Ray was ugly (rather like John XXIII--though his children were beautiful), wonderfully ebullient, and smart: an architectural engineer, polyglot, well and widely read in history and the arts. My grandfather, his father-in-law, though vastly inferior to him, despised him.

Reading with ravishment Ethan Mordden's "Buddy" novels. Dazzling writing--and the man is so prolific. I'm inspired to do a little revision-of, or a little adding-to, my own musical/esthetic history.

I suppose it warps you to be exposed to a full-scale Broadway version of Kismet, the way Mordden was, at age only six. You're not old enough then to appreciate how vulgar, how trashily sentimental, how stupidly derivative this worst of Broadway musicals is, with its one tawdry tune stolen from Borodin's already monotonous Polivitzian Dance[s], and its oh-so-lame second-hand exoticism. Naturally, he was enthralled, infected, poisoned by it; he was too young to develop anti-bodies, and so his taste (and judgement) was forever warped and stunted by it. Pity. It happens. I know of a similar case, of a boy who attended the movie Gone with the Wind when he was only nine, and thought that the soundtrack was beautiful, and so lost the ability to tell when female opera singers have lost their voice: He was applauding Maria Callas when it was no longer possible to tell which was 'Sempre Libera' and which was a breaking champagne glass.

I thank my lucky stars that I was ten years old, full of anti-bodies, and already a perfervid hater of "musical" comedy when I first, and last, saw the movie version of Kismet. I had been hoping for a Burt Lancaster acrobatic/adventure movie. Well you may imagine therefore that by the second or third effusion of heterosexual sediment--perhaps fifteen minutes into it--I was leading my fellow sufferers in throwing popcorn at the screen, making fart-noises, and singing our own rude songs over the feculent drivel being crooned at us. I daresay we drowned it out--or at least made it impossible for anyone else to enjoy it.

Reflections on the Conspiracy

When considering events like 9/11 or the burning of the Reichstag, or the murders of Courrier or Zola, you don't ask "is it possible that...?" You simply, logically deduce from (1) the nature of the event, and (2) from the obvious evidence of who profited from it, who the perpetrators were.

Beautiful heavy rain last night, hours and hours, with little wind. It actually got rather cool. I went walking in it, under my K-Mart golf umbrella, getting soaked from the water I kicked up with my flip-flops, but keeping my glasses dry. Reading Edmund White's The Married Man: realistic in a surprising, almost Flaubertian way, showing the dignity that the imminence of death (AIDS) confers even to silly, inconsequential men; like the 'Peter' of the story, so justly despised by 'Big Lucien.'

The answer to the bedbugs was just a little Lady Macbeth-type resolution and some Raid House and Garden Insecticide.

And so Life goes on. I've been working 2 to 3 hours in the morning, five days a week as an opthmologist's receptionist since the third week of August, making a little less than $200 every couple of weeks; both not minding it, and finding it maddeningly restrictive, working that many days a week, though but less than half-days. So today I took my courage in hand and approached "Marissa" who owns and runs my favorite porn shop and asked her to think about hiring me three days a week: She seemed little short of delighted with me, and virtually promised to start me working, if not this weekend, the next. So adieu Opthamology, hello Carnal Delight. Melissa, moreover, is thoroughly nice Lesbian person, whom I liked quite as well as she seemed to like me. What could be better?

Read overnight, and re-read, Robert Taylor's All we Have is Now, a riff, sort-of, on Matthew Sheppard's murder; but, whatever the impropriety of that, full of beautiful, clean, intelligent writing, as was the first book of Mr. Taylor's that I read, The Innocent.

Waking early, as I like to do, and profiting from the neat twelve-hour difference between here and Germany, I called Phil just at 7:00. We chatted aimiably for quarter of an hour or so, exchanging gossip of the good-natured sort about our mutual friends, comparing the march of the seasons: cold, windy, wet, in the 2's celsius (mid-30's fahrenheit) in Koeln; upper 80's here in the daytime, down to the 70's at night--Phil was scarcely sympathetic at my having trouble sleeping. Then, just as we were sort of winding down, while he was telling me about his voice-teaching career, I noticed a purplish slow-moving bug about 3/16's of an inch long crawling out of my bedsheets (I'd neglected for once to make my bed), and as Phil rambled on I reached over and squished it against the mattress. It squirted an amazing several drops of blood--my blood. And as I watched with mounting horror, three or four more bedbugs slowly crawled out of the mattress, which I had strippped of bedclothes and set on edge, and one by one I squished them, staining the mattress with fingerprint-sized splotches of purplish blood-my blood. Briefly, I told Phil what had been happening, and rang off. Then I pulled on some streetclothes and fled. I haven't been back to my apartment yet; not knowing what to do, sick at heart and utterly grossed out. But I must do something soon.

Love, love, love Dan Savage's books Commitment and Skipping towards Gomorrah. With a couple of differences (1. He doesn't "get" classical music; freely admits he hates Bach and Mozart. 2. He doesn't have a clue that 9/11 was an inside job; can't, or won't, understand that Osama Bin Laden is a CIA operative.) aside, he speaks for me in the very same Conservative Standard American English that I speak and think in. In all important matters (sex, love, philosophy of life and childcare) we are as one, despite his being twenty years my junior. And he is a clever, spare, perfect writer; better than me even.

Looking for something among the humanists (where I suspect, generally, I have my home) that I was sure I might agree with, I checked out a book called Animal Rites, being persuaded by the forward (by somebody other than the author of the book, one Cary Wolfe) that I would find something approaching my own philosophy/religion of humane veneration/respect of/for all beings (not necessarily animate) possessed of character or "personality." And what I found as I got into the book proper was a text professing to be little more than an extrapolation and a commentary on: Freud, Toni Morrison, Lyotard, Hemingway, Derrida, and the movie The Silence of the Lambs. So let's deal with these things in order:

1. Freud is...nothing at all. But a very unpleasant, obscenely sick-making, deliberately fraudulent nothing. There is not only no truth in Freud, there is nothing at all interesting in Freud. Talking about Freud, being serious about Freud, is the philosophical equivalent of treating farting as meaningful discourse.

2. I have never read a word written by Toni Morrison; neither shall I ever. I've seen Ms. Morrison in interview on television--accidentally walking into the room, finding the televsion on--and I very much disliked her, her manner, and her subject matter. I give not a rusty rat's patootie that she has won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes for literature, there is nothing (I gather, from the reviews, the blurbs on the cover, and what Ms. Morrison herself has to say about her work) that could cause me to read a paragraph or a page of Beloved--so boring, so inimical, so nasty is its subject. And she writes about nothing else--I don't want even to say what she writes about. Not here. As a representative (prudish, Republican) female Virgo woman I know always says, "You say 'shit,' you get some on you."

3. Lyotard: head-breaking, pointless obscurity, about nothing worth thinking about, or nothing really at all; often with reference to Freud or Foucault.

4. Hemingway: mannered macho sadist; way too self-consciously hairy-chested to be real. Note: All I have ever read of Hemingway, and all I shall ever have read, are a few pages at the beginning of The Sun also Rises--for me a hideous experience, which I will not willingly risk repeating or prolonging.

5. Derrida: What I said about Lyotard (and what I will say about Foucault if the subject ever comes up).

6. The Silence of the Lambs--"brilliant"? Give me a fucking break. People who talk about TSOTL and fail to note that it is, after all, viciously, witlessly and almost inadvertantly homophobic, are idiots; most particularly are they drivelling assholes who, like Cary Wolfe, can see nothing worse about this deliberately ugly and stupid flick than that it is "heterosexist." Of course I have not seen it--Why would I?

All that said, be it further noted that, without the least inconsistency in the world, I adore Jean Baudrillard, and share every single one of his opinions about everything, except his nasty, snobbish and wrong put-down of California wines: The "War in the Gulf" did not happen, just as Baudrillard said it didn't; the difference between democrats (small 'd') and egalitarians is that for egalitarians equality is something to strive for, while for democrats it is something that has already happened.

On my way to work yesterday, for the first time in the ten months that I've been on this magic island, I saw one of Oahu's famous deadly centipedes, about four inches long (I understand they get several times as big), crawling right across the sidewalk before me in front of the Queen's Hospital. It was neither hurrying nor dallying, giving me time to inspect it--even to count its legs if I wanted--and to reflect on whether it was it my will, desire, or duty to step on it. Finally I let it go unharmed and unmolested. Not that close inspection had charmed me, or that I was persuaded that it represented anything other than a kind of absolute evil-in-itself; but an uneasy, superstitious presentiment that if there were a Law of Karma, I'd be asking for some really hideous consequences, and the innocence of its attitude--it was alive, just doing its thing--stayed my stomping foot.

In amongst the smut, I had occasion last night to read Romain Rolland's (whom I adore)'s biographical esssay on Rousseau--and there it was: what I had somehow (I have no idea how, unless Camille Paglia suggested it to me) known: the connection between Robespierre and Rousseau, and Freud and Rousseau; even unto a certain famous speech that Robespierre made in Flore'al (May) of 1794, about which, I swear, I nothing knew. I have heard, and rather liked, both of Rousseau's little operettas, Le Devin du Village and Les Troqueurs, and you'd think that that would soften my heart towards him, realizing how much like moi, after all, was the subject of this protracted and, technically, ignorant animadversion.

But no, what it gets round to is a perception that I (and apparently no one else) have of 18th century Europe; France in especial. I understand, in a way that nobody else seems to, that the arts of music and furniture-making reached a kind of apogee in the 1780's that essentially vanished, perished in the Terror under the blade of the guillotine, along with a certain absolute moral and social equality of the sexes. With Robespierre, adieu Roentgen, Fragonard, Mozart (Boccherini and Viotti), and les Liaisons dangereuses.