Reading: Baumeister's Escaping the Self. What I'm going to do, when I get my computer (hopefully by this time next week) and learn how to do it, is copy out several chapters from this book, with cross-references to the two pieces by Sam D'Allesandro, and to my own little disquisition on Self Vs. Ego. Now I understand--and I didn't before--what the Self is: The Body/Physical Sensation + Extrapolated/Constructed/Abstracted/Reflective Meaning/Definition/Emotion. Among the fascinating discoveries I've been making is that Emotion is one of the more elaborate Constructs of this abstract super-physical Self. But and also, the "Amour-propre" of La Rochefoucauld (whose Maximes I have virtually memorized) fits like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle into (this amazing monstrosity of Rational Western Identity-Consciousness) the "Individual Self." Well, well, well. Much to say and think about. Primo: I had always, till I read this--actually the turn-around began when I read Sam D'Allessandro's little 'stories' and realized that he meant something by "It's not an unusual need, having someone else take the reins for awhile," ("the reins"?) and that I, like Scott and Jeff and 'Mr. Jones,' didn't understand what it was--always, I say, known that alcohol and downer drugs were an escape from rational thought and paralyzants of the central nervous system, and not, as their abusers (or users) are always claiming, .a high like my drugs of choice, which expand, stimulate, elevate thought and feeling. "Drunks and downer freaks," I always like to say, "are cowards, subhuman creeps afraid of thinking and knowing what they're feeling." I'd've said that about masochists too, if I'd thought of it. Well I don't say that anymore. And I now see that my pornography addiction is just that, an addiction, which serves the exact same purpose as any other escape (masochism, alcoholism, religion) from the ever-tense, ever-emotional, ever-judgemental Western Humanist Individual Self which I, like everybody, have internalized, and which rules me (as I had never before realized) as absolutely as it does everybody else. Hmm. But I'm still gnawing (or it's gnawing me) at what exactly did Sam mean by "...how good pure intensity can feel...the vulnerability of being spanked during sex by someone [one] really want[s]." [my italics] What the hell does "vulnerability" have to do with anything? I've googled "being vulnerable," just to see, and there are a whole lot of the pseudo-wise--mostly silly-ass women, but not a few dipshit male psychotherapists--out there, prattling on about the virtues and benefits of "vulnerability." They all seem to know that the basic meaning of "vulnerable" is "woundable," but that doesn't stop them from finding something inherently positive in it.

Following Sam

Reading now Roy F. Baumeister's Masochism and the Self and Identity (Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self), I note with satisfaction that Sam D'Allessandro's exposition of the meaning and purpose of sexual (there is no other kind--further proof of Freud's fraudulence)masochism tallies exactly with the analysis derived from empirical study by Baumeister: Deconstruction of the self; abnegation of the will and reduction of the self to specific bodily sensation. Baumeister even goes very plausibly into why that is a pleasurable thing for masochists. He also gives a very good summation of the the nature of the complex, abstract, outwardly focused self which has evolved since the Renaissance in the Western World (and nowhere else): "The culture began to prescribe that everyone be unique, autonomous, self-promoting, and responsible. No doubt many people were quite happy about these new demands, but it is unlikely [but still, why?] that everyone would be equally comfortable with the new selfhood. As a result, there may have been an increased need to escape from [the] self periodically." Gotta say, it ain't my bag, but thanks to Sam D'Allessandro and Roy F. Baumeister, at last (because I've always wondered), I think I've got a handle on it. That does not mean, however, that I am going to go that extra step and extend the hand of compassionate friendship to homophobic, heterosexual creeps like Earnest Hemingway who want to chop the ends of their penises off (as in The Sun Also Rises) just so they can be more thoroughly sodomized by women. Yuck.

My Self and Masochism

You may have noticed, boys and girls, that, for all its ego-centrism, this blog isn't really about egotism. And you may have wondered--as have I--where I'm going with it. Well, to put the matter as clearly as I know how, what all this about is the Voyage of Self-Discovery. The difference is that egos are proud of themselves, or ashamed, or trying (always) trying to justify or excuse themselves or become something they're not. Selves just are. They don't care about trying to be or become. What concerns selves is that they don't know what they are and they want to find out--in a way that egos are too incurious, too fearful, too vainglorious, or too judgemental even to think about. Another difference between egos and selves is that egos have opinions, are aware of believing and thinking and loving and hating things; but only selves know why; even though, mostly, they don't know how they know. A case in point is my lifelong aversion from, contempt for, disdain and hatred of Earnest Hemingway, the man and his works--and really I hadn't read enough to say why. Just something told me. Well...doing a little research on Sam D'Allessandro's (to me) startling paean to vulnerability and self-abnegation-as-pleasure, googling "masochism," what do I find but that the latest book out on Hemingway (Richard Fantina's Earnest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism) is about "Papa's" heterosexual masochism cum homophobia ("Machismo" forsooth!): Hemingway was a pussy-man. Maybe I'd better define that. A pussy-man is a male heterosexual who feels, and has no qualms about acting as if, no man is as good as any woman. They are unconscionably and unconsciously rude to other men--as though to deny that they themselves are men. The 18th century was full of pussy-men (Rousseau, Goldoni, Louis XV); which is why it's called the Age of Women. You can tell a pussy-man (if you're a man) by the way he doesn't notice you if he can help it, and if you do say anything to him he will stare a moment at the air next to you (as if that's where your voice came from) and turn to any one of the ladies present and say, "Do you feel that that is so, Betty-Jean?" Very often pussy-men are masochists, and usually they think Sigmund Freud a genius.

Went shopping today, at the Apple Store, for computer, and at Shiroyiga, for High Definition monitor; about $2500 for the former, $3500 for the latter. Cable's being installed on the 3rd of next month (11 gigabytes per second), $49 per mo. I'm having fun.

Also re-reading Sam d'Allessandro's Wild Creatures--prose so spare it almost disappears. And the best exposition both of gay male sexuality and of gay masochism (about which I know nothing) I've ever read. From 'Electrical Type of Thing':

We are drawn to each other. We are each the free electron the other's unbalanced nucleus needs. It's an electrical type of thing. A charge.

...I told Scott and Jeff about the way Chris and I are together. I wanted to hear someone else accept the relationship just as it is, the way I have. Instead they gently tried to tell me about the way loving relationships are supposed to be, always sharing and sensitive, etc. Chris and I are sensitive, only in a different way. Chris and I share some needs and the means to satisfy them. Together we're self-contained. Scott and Jeff tell me that there are other needs to consider, that a relationship can't be based on sexual intensity alone. I say if sexual intensity's there the relationship has already been based.

I don't think we can always be sure what it is we need; that seems to be different for me than it is for Scott and Jeff. Or is it? Maybe Scott and Jeff have forgotten how good pure intensity can feel. Maybe they've never experienced the vulnerability of being spanked during sex by someone they really want. Or known the relief you can feel when someone gets you to forget yourself totally. Someone who helps you to find a subhuman state--no language, no questions, no problems--just a pulsing, quivering slab of sensation. People would pay a guru or a Rolfer to do that. Or Werner Erhard. It's not an unusual desire. It's not an unusual need, letting someone else take the reins for a while. I'd rather be physically fucked by Chris than verbally fucked by Werner Erhard. I never wanted my parents to spank me, but when I can pick who's doing it I enjoy a good spanking. Skin craves sensation. It's those nerve endings. It's the way we're made.

Not of course that I agree (Pain hurts!), but I think I see what he means. And it sounds for all the world like Ethan Mordden's notion of Real All-Consuming Love, as expressed in his marvelous short story 'The Shredding of Peter Hawkins,' which I have read, at a conservative estimate, twenty times. But one more story, the same as the first, only a little diffferently stated, "Walking to the Ocean This Morning:"

The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and then fucked like a dog. I don't mean on my hands and knees, I mean hard and carelessly. I want someone relentless. When I was with Tom, before, saying no in the morning could easily be followed by a slap in the face and a spanking so hard it would send me crawling from room to room looking for escape in fear of even being touched on my now-burning ass, until he would decide to catch me and fuck me roughly on the floor. I'd start out whimpering and end up moaning within minutes. Once he had me in that place, he like to threaten to stop just to hear me beg him not to. Tom loved to create situations that would totally turn what I thought I wanted at that moment to the opposite, from saying I didn't want to have sex that morning to begging him not to stop fucking my spanked ass. He didn't force me to do anything, he just created situations in which I wanted what he was going to give me anyway. Sometimes he'd fuck me real hard and then pull out, holding my legs straight up in the air in a flying V, looking at my enlarged asshole sucking air to fill the vacancy, begging for his cock to return. I loved being so vulnerable. I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs. If your body wants something bad enough, you can't say no no matter how humiliating. He could say anything, call me anything, make me do anything, after which I would immediately start begging for his cock. At those moments I didn't matter, only my ass did.

Re-reading (and re-re-reading) Ethan Mordden's Buddies and I've a Feeling we're not in Kansas anymore; from the latter of which ('The Case of the Dangerous Man'):

...keeping the fantasy fantastical allows every one to play. In a culture run by the fascism of looks, the Imaginary Lover is a democratic exercize. A beauty knows he might well land something comparable to supreme, even be one. A nice-looking fellow has a shot at it. A homely-but-hot man is ever loveable. And certain objets trouve's may win out through force of personality; unthinkable but true, my favorite combination. Below a certain level of appearance, however, a gay man is in big trouble; yet everyone can dream. And, though no one likes to hear about this, I know that the ugliest man in town visualizes himself being fondled, or toughed up, or tucked in by some divo just as easily as the handsomest man can. But why does no one want to hear about this?
Carlo shook his finger at me when I spoke of the matter late one night. And when I went on undeterred, he held his hand over my mouth and said, "I want you to please stop. I don't want to know about morals, or politics, or death, or feelings, or any of the other things that ruin everybody's fun**."

"What morals?"

"Trolls,"+ he said. "Talking about trolls+ is talking morals. Or politics."



+ See blogs November 28 and December 13, 2007

**See blog December 13, 2007

Karma? Luck?

The thing I most disagree with Buddhism about is its way too-certain notion of cause-and-effect. I don't mean to deny that when bad things happen to me I probably deserve them; but it seems to me, on the face of it, preposterously vainglorious to think that the good things which happen to me are the result of acquired merit--in this or previous existences. Horsepoop. The very notion of trying to estimate what "merit" I might have "earned" makes me blush.

So, let's say that--when, on the 29th of August, at about 5:00 p.m., I hurried into the 7-Eleven Store a couple of doors down from my apartment house, scurrying to pick up a bowl of noodles for supper, and, there being no sign up saying 'piso mojado,' slipped in a puddle of mop-water and fell backwards in a kind of cheer-leader splits, breaking the fibula of my left leg in two places, and my left ankle, and tearing the ligament away from my left knee--I had it coming. But let's admit that--when the lawyers representing 7-eleven's insurance company called me this morning and told me that within five to ten days I'm going to be getting a check from them for $15,000--that was pure gravy, which no accumulation of virtue or good works that I am aware of can account for.

And so what is this Unworthy One going to do with this Providential Windfall?--more money than I have ever had together at one time in my entire life. No question, the first thing I'm going to do is buy a High-Definition Television together with a state-of-the-art Personal Computer with all the attachments, DVD Player/Recorder, etc. ; and I'll be installing Linux Software, and, of course, getting Fiber-Optic Cable Internet Hook-up. Questionably, I'll pay off my debt to my Alma Mater, releasing my official transcripts, and enrolling for Spring Quarter in a Master's program at the University of Hawaii (I've already been accepted, pending release of the transcripts). But I'm thinking: Really do I want to continue my academic career? For what? I don't want to teach. My Magna cum Laude B.A. and my Phi Beta Kappa award, not to mention the list of scholarships and diplomas from Perugia and Siena (with the magical ottimo!), won so late in life, are all the prestigious validation anybody should need. The thing is that U of H's obligatory second year of the French Master's program in Paris, with the optional semester in Florence; which is mighty tempting. Whatever--everything now is within my reach. Funny place for a shiftless ne'er-do-well to be in.

No, "misogynist" is not exactly what I am, not in the sense that I hate or fear the Sex. Although, come to think of it, there are a good many things (subjectivism, virtual absence of a sense of personal space, touching) I dislike about them, and am in some ways revolted and outraged by (see blog April 9, 2006), there's no generic hatred of women in me, and no attribution by me to them of mystic "powers." Of course, in a general sense, I find women sexually repulsive; the specifics of their menstruating, chlamydia-prone physical bodies is simply nauseous to me. But I am a social, humane sort of person, able to ignore the physical characteristics of my fellow human beings, and, of course, never, ever, given to making personal remarks--and I am always nice, like aristocrats of the ancien regime about whom you could never tell who among them was fucking whom because they were all perfectly nice to everybody. Things that don't require mention, like women's awful taste in literature and movies, and the horrible way they smell (women's perfumes), I ignore.

I can't help being amused, and a little bit saddened (I am not a monster), by the fact that no woman likes watching soap operas with me--soap operas which of course I abominate and never watch unless solicited to do so--because I know, sight unseen, the plots and character-developments better than they do, and can't help anticipating and laughing at them (the plots and character-developments) and so spoiling them for them (my women friends). Likewise I observe that letting me, as respresentative Alpha Male, handle the remote gives all women and some men nervous conniptions. Even if I overcome my instinctual too-rapid nervous response and give those with slower perception-time a chance to watch television (rather than seeing what's on), I tend to mute commercials, almost unconsciously, even before the slower sexes realize that their show is on hiatus and they're being advertised at. This causes enormous frustration; because what causes the dumbies among us to want to watch commercials is a wordless, inchoate resentment at having to exercize critical judgement--even in silence.

So, steeling myself, viewing the nasty lesbo-cooty-shit distantly, as it were at the wrong end of a telescope, and holding my breath, I skimmed both Forrest's and Burrowes' stories so rapidly that I scarcely snagged at any of the horrid lesbian images or potty-rubbing emotionalisms; a shattering "slipping her arm around her waist" in the first story, a sick-making plethora of female names and pronouns in the latter (like stumbling into a baby shower or a drag show), and I got to the end of both with only the vaguest notion of what I'd read, and no recollection of plot, character, or characterization--though I sensed somehow that Burrowes' story had been the nastier (more explicitly "sexual"). Not too bad. I swear upon the altar of Zeus, however, and by all the rivers of Hell, that I will never put myself through anything like that again....

Ick!

So plowing through the collected works of Michael Nava, I've come upon Finale, Short Stories of Mystery and Suspense, edited and introduced by him, thinking this would be very heaven (as in, "Heaven is lying all day on a sofa reading endless French novels"). Then, reading the list of contributing authors, I note with disquiet and disgust that two of them, Katherine V. Forrest and Ivy Burrowes, are authoresses (ick!); and when I read Nava's introduction, I find with creeping horror that he says things like: "I do not fault gay and lesbian writers who choose to write about the experience of being gay." As if that single word could apply to the absolutely dissimilar experiences (and natures) of (gay) men and (lesbian) women--whatever heterosexual bigots, women, pussy-men and pansies may stupidly presume about their similarity . In the next paragraph, teasingly (I suppose, but double ick!), Nava says, "You need all kinds of ingredients to make a mystery work and the mystery writer must cast her nets far and wide into her experience to populate her story [my italics, of course]. This kind of imagining forces us to think beyond ourselves and our immediate circumstances" Then: "The two stories in this collection that best illustrate my point are Katherine Forrest's 'Jessie' and Richard Hall's 'Death writes a Story.' In both the issue of homosexuality is so subtle as to appear absent and yet, try to imagine them if homosexuality did not figure in them at all. I am particularly proud, by the way to include both these writers. Katherine Forrest's Kate Delafield novels, popular among women, deserve a wider following among men. Both Katherine and Kate are first-rate...."

I fucking doubt it.

Ick! is a personal thing. Your ick! is not necessarily mine. One can say, however, that one of the things most resented, by women about men, is the fairly unanimous reaction of men to shopping, clit flicks, clit lit, unnecessary disclosures of feelings of jealousy, inadequacy, and "vulnerability," details of personal hygiene: Ick! Being a virgo as well as a man, having a real innate, karmic revulsion against vulgarity, cruelty, uncleanliness, emotional exhibitionism, the list of things that I can't bear to think or hear about is--so my friends tell me--longer than most: Surgical procedures of any sort, including hypodermic injections; all atonal music except my own; all farts, poops, mucus other than my own; just about everything written by women who aren't Frenchwomen; anything at all suggestive, much less explicitly revelatory, of the menstruating, chlamydia-prone physical nature of women; all disclosures whatsoever of the creepy negative emotional natures of women--and especially, and in spades, the affective nature and physical practises of lesbians. It's my ick! and I indulge it with studied abhorrence. As a general thing, if I see that something about men--especially gay men--has been written by a woman, I shield my eyes, making the crossed-fingers Vampires Begone! sign and--not just don't read it--pretend I haven't seen it. If an anthology of purportedly gay literature contains anything written by a lesbian, I shudder, sigh, and put it back on the shelf. And, of course, I do the same with anthologies of ghost stories and mysteries. It's not so much that I want women, their emotional and physical natures, to be kept in their place, as that I don't want them anywhere near me.

And so, as with Ethan Mordden and twelve-tone music, my latest, most passionate enthusiasm, Michael Nava has utterly ambushed, utterly sandbagged me, with his vile and nasty equivalence of gay and lesbian "experience," his nauseating, treasonous intrusion of icky lesbian sensibility (even, O Horror Unspeakable, of lesbian eroticism--Who knew, really, that there was such a thing as lesbian eroticism, until I googled Forrest's Curious Wine and read the reviews?) where I had hoped and believed never to encounter it.

So what am I going to do? Forrest's lesbo fantasy is the second story in the anthology. I'm halfway through the first, very good story by a male writer, and I'm dreading what lies next more and more, every time I turn a page....Shall I have even to read the unheard-of Ivy Burrowes' cooty-ridden lucubration?

God fucking damn it to hell....

Gay Mystery

Reading (one to two a day) the 'Henry Rios' novels of Michael Nava; saving the best, the Death of Friends, for last. How does one describe the peculiar excellence of Nava's work? Partly, I may say, that, while I had been looking for "gayness," (not so much to titilate--though a certain, not disproportionate, titilation there is--as to validate) what I find is gay humanity, or maybe a profound and personal gay humanism. I am affected by his writing rather as one might be who had asked for a glass of water, and found himself drenched with spring rain. There are flaws (not many, but) which bespeak Nava's Chicano subculture roots: An inconsistent use of "lay" or "laid" as the past tense of "lay," with some preference for the former; an occasional prepositional phrase twisted awkwardly in English out of native Mexican Spanish--flaws like acne or smallpox scars in a beautiful young face, which evoke pity and are easily overlooked, as one perceives the astonishingly subtle and dignified character of the person beneath them. I quote, from the Burning Plain:

That night I dreamed...It was Josh. He was dressed in the clothes in which he'd been cremated but he was whole again. His flesh was supple, his hair shone and his eyes were clear, free of pain or fear...

"My God, Josh," I whispered, "You're alive."

"No," he said gently, "I've come back, but just for a minute." He slipped out of my embrace.

"What do you mean, Josh? What is this place?"

"Come with me," he said, taking my hand. We walked to the edge of the promontory. He looked across the brilliant sea and said, "This is a sort of jumping-off point."

"Jumping to where?"

"He spread his arm above the ocean. "There. Henry it's my time. That's why I came back, to say good-bye."

"I don't understand."

He stroked my hair. "It's hard to explain. After you die, there's a place, a place of judgement. Kind of. It's a place you've always carried around inside. It's what you imagine happens after you die. If you imagine heaven, that's what you get. If you imagine hell, you get hell." He clasped my hand tighter. "But the point is, they don't exist except in your imagination, and when you realize that, you're free to go."

"Go where, Josh?"

He released my hand and stared out at the sea of light. The look on his face was ecstatic. He whispered, "There are no words..." He seemed to burn from within, with a light of such intensity he became translucent, a rainbow aureole forming around his head. Without changing shape, he seemed to grow larger and larger, until the clouds drifted across his eyes. His face shone like the sun and his legs were like pillars of fire. I could no long look at him and cowered, afraid I would be consumed by his light.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "Look at me."

I looked and it was as if I saw through him, past the awesome light, to something indescribable.
Later, I remembered it as a rose as vast as the universe, charged with intelligence, serenely folding and unfolding shimmering petals of fire.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, oh..."

And then it was over. The inhumanely [sic] radiant light faded, he shrank to his normal size and I could hold him in my arms again.

He kissed me again with a mouth that tasted of apple.

""Good-bye, Henry," he said. "I loved you so much. More than either of us knew."

"Will I ever see you again?"

"Look into yourself," he replied, slowly seeping into the gloam of dreams. "We're the same person."

"Josh..."

I woke to darkness, tears running down my face.

Vile Travesties

Forty years ago when I had just moved again to San Francisco, I heard playing one afternoon on an F.M. radio classical music station something called a "concertino" by "Giambattista Pergolesi." I was ravished by it. I wrote down the name of the piece and the composer and walked immediately to a discount record store south of Market (I was living then just north of Market in a seedy hotel in the Tenderloin) and special-ordered it. In a couple of weeks it had arrived: a L'Oiseau-Lyre recording (vinyl, of course, as records were in those days), from Paris via New York, of all four of "Pergolesi's" concertini. And they were all as ravishingly beautiful as the small sample I'd heard had led me to expect that they would be. Of Course they weren't really written by Pergolesi: Nobody knew who the composer of them was. An anonymous Dutch nobleman, c. 1740 was the best guess. But that didn't matter to me, because they were beautiful; better actually than any real Pergolesi I ever heard (I'm not that fond of la Serva Padrona, or of the Stabat Mater, supposedly the real Pergolesi's best stuff--). I listened to them over and over until, as records did then, they wore out. But by then I had memorized them--every note. After that occasionally I'd check them out of a music library, or hear them played on the radio again--for all their anonymity, they're not that obscure--and I never, ever found them less beautiful on reacquaintance. Until one day, moved by I know not what snob impulse, I sat down to listen to Igor Stravinsky's the Rake's Progress. I think I had heard that the Rake's Progress was "neo-classical," and I thought that must be "neo-classical" as in Louis XVI furniture, or Paul Revere silver, or Prokofiev's "classical" symphony. But what it was was my old favourite pseudo-Pergolesi concertini, "modernized," jazzed-up, full of smart-ass dissonance and abrasive percussion: Stravinsky, with unspeakable cowardice and envious hatred for the kind of beauty he himself (unlike Prokofiev) couldn't begin actually to create, had taken these exquisite relics of a time when it didn't matter whose music it was, so long as it was beautiful and gave delight--and shit on them, and wiped his ass with them; broke their necks and stuck wires in them.

Much the same may be said about Carl Orff's brutal, contemptuously inappropriate setting of goliardic poetry: Who would think, listening to this percussive neo-primitivism, that some of the world's most delicate, spring-like poetry is concealed beneath it?

Not that Little Igor, with his Sacre du Printemps (the "malicious child who will destroy music," as Debussy had foretold), had not already given Spring a bloody/shitty, Jungian/Freudian, pseudo-primitive wallop--muddying the very World's Renewal at its source, leaving not a lot, in truth, for Schoenberg and his clones to do; though, of course, what manner of villainy they could think to do, they did.

Male Beauty

The notion, the meaning of the term Male Beauty skitters away from language held hostage to the conventional Heterosexual Hegemony, as of something essentially non-existent, absurd, self-contradictory. Women are beautiful; men are handsome. And truthfully there is some justification in the judgement of received convention. Women have shape; men are in shape.

Having just read nearly simultaneously: Mike Albo's Hornito (my lie life), and "Sam d'Allessandro's" Wild Creatures and other stories. Having at the same time stopped reading: David Valdes Greenwood's Homo Domesticus, after a very few pages, overcome by a sense of the author's nauseous showing-off, of unintentional conventionality, of some sort of sick compensation for personal inadequacies--confirmed when I looked at the picture of the author on the flyleaf of the back cover: A grotesquely fat, ugly, subhuman face, the face of someone who would write a book about being "gay," and a "husband," and a "father," just to prove that he's not the silly, ugly+, inconsiderable, less than fully human person+ he actually is. At the same time I am thinking how important it is that Albo and d'Allessandro and Mordden are and were in their time physically beautiful youths and men, and how they could not be the gay persons nor the excellent gay writers they are without being consciously, sincerely, physically beautiful--in the male sense of the term. These are not superficies. Cruel so be it, to women, and effeminate losers like Greenwood: this is the reality of gay. Remember that line of Drew Carey's: "Me gay? No way! I'm not in that kind of shape!"


+ Troll. See blogs December 26th, 2007.

Out of Kenya

From that interesting part of the world where AIDS, the Mau Mau, and we ourselves probably come from--Kenya--comes word of the discovery of a new species of spitting cobra, Naja Ashei, which differs from other species of spitting cobra in being by far the largest (averaging over nine feet long), and producing at least twice as much venom per bite as any other spitting cobra. The last is of particular interest to the human inhabitants of Kenya who heretofore, when bitten by it and rushed to treatment, have been given less than half of the necessary amount of anti-venin--it being assumed that they had been bitten by an ordinary, black, spitting cobra, which Naja Ashei resembles..."A new species of giant spitting cobra is exciting and reinforces the obvious," said noted kenyan ecologist Richard Leakey, "--that there have to be many other unreported species but hundreds are being lost as their habitats disappear under the continued mismanagement of our planet...." In other words, if our planet weren't being mismanaged, species like Naja Ashei would not disappear. Or, in still other words, if our planet were being properly managed, there would be giant spitting cobras everywhere. In other words, Species, like Cultures, are good, no matter what the hell they are....Does this go back to Levy-Strauss?

Long talk with Phil yesterday morning, wide-ranging over visual pattern-recognition vs. "computation" in chimpanzees; home movies and snapshots in the Third Reich; the morbidity of serialist "emotion;" the validity of Evil. I got to say Why are Wozzeck and Lulu and Die Soldaten (Phil had never heard of Henze before) so preoccupied with the abjectly unpleasant? And why is the question so seldom asked? Anent Henze, Mordden says that the only reason his awful stuff is ever performed at all in the United States is that "those scheduling concerts must from time to time include the work of a living composer or be laughed out of the annals."

Reading, having read: Ethan Mordden's non-fictional work on opera, theater, and, in especial, his non-musician's Guide to Orchestral Music, which, along with certain remarks in Hans Keller's Great Haydn Quartets, has sent me into the long defensive funk I've been in lately over the ugliness, villainy, and preposterous fraudulence of twelve-tone (anti-overtone series) music. Here, after all, are people whom I like and respect, and whose fundamental opinions about most things are virtually identical with my own. Keller, for example, points out the unsettled tonality of the adagio of Opus 76, No. 6, showing it to have to correspond to the same unsettledness in the contemporary 'Representation of Chaos' at the beginning of the Creation--and throws the spanner that this "air from another planet" was just what Schoenberg was evoking in his creation of serialism.

Reading a lot lately, almost too much to blog about: (1) On the bus, to and from work, I've been reading Le Livre d'Or de la Poe'sie Francaise (A-H) edited by one Seghers (whose first name I forget. Great stuff in it, from profoundly unsettling to perfectly charming; the biggest revelation for me, so far, being Jean Cocteau, whose poetry is subtle, clear, and amazingly (despite his avant-gardist reputation) literate. Who knew? (2) I've been reading the scores along with the Haydn quartets Opus 54, Nos. 1 & 2, and the Mozart quartets K. 461, 469, 499, and 575--both the latters (the 2nd, "Tost" Haydn quartet, and K.575) proving really not totally comprehensible without the scores in front of me. Gotta say the C Major "Tost" quartet is as close as Haydn ever came to writing ugly (brainiac) music; not, of course that it is ugly--but close to ugly it certainly is. The second movement, for example, is damn-it-all Gypsy "music," much more realistic than, say, Bizet's, only just barely rescued from nauseous verisimiltude and self-negation by Haydn's impeccable metric; and only just barely providing necessary preparation for the astounding, and not entirely pleasant, slow-fast-slow last movement. This is, of course, the anti-form that Beethoven grabbed and ran with, turning his last quartets into wretched, unmusical, unlistenable orchestral scraping. Muss es sein? Wahrlich nicht.

But please, I didn't intend ever in my life to do anything other than simply avoid and, to the best of my ability, ignore the intentional ugliness of modern music--getting on to the century mark now with Le Sacre du Printemps. As a youth, naturally, I sometimes dabbled in atonality, listened over and over to le Chant du Rossignol, practically memorized la Mer; even, on one memorable summer's day of my thirteenth year, sketched out a polytonal canon at the Major 7th for string quartet, which I discovered years later while going through my juvenilia and found still to have a very interesting, very real charm. The story of how I came to write it will explain much about me and music and many other things. My mother's mother died at the end of June that year. Not knowing anything really about her father's domestic arrangements--or if she knew, ignoring the fact that he had acquired a housekeeper with whom he had apparently been living on terms of connubial intimacy throughout his wife's final illness--my mother, bringing me and my younger brother along with her, simply moved in with my grandfather in his big old(five bedroom) farmhouse, an oasis of willows and cottonwoods and green pastures along Willow Creek among the dry rolling hills of the Palouse (in Eastern Washington State) called Pampa, for several weeks on either side of the funeral, "doing for" him; my father meanwhile, stayed home in Oregon City with the cats. There was little for my brother and me to do except to go out severally (we didn't like one another and tried to spend as little time as possible in one another's company) walking among the gardens and pastures, or staying inside or in the yard reading. In the front parlour there was a piano that my grandmother hadn't played or had tuned for decades that I sometimes amused myself by trying to get music out of, despite its sour discordancies. Then one day it occurred to me: Why not write sour music for it? So was born a short, lively polytonal fugue which I scored for Cello in A Minor, Viola in B Flat Minor, 2nd Violin in B Minor, and First Violin in C Minor. Amazingly and amusingly it worked. My grandfather came in while I was absorbed in writing it--I had started it at the piano, and moved to the floor with the parts scattered around me, and didn't notice his approach; and was startled when he spoke to me. In a hesitant, husky voice, with what I realized with astonishment was deep feeling, he said, "Go on doing what you're doing. I just want to say--you don't have to, but if you want to, I think you should become a composer. You probably won't make any money at it, but don't let that stop you. Just do what you want to do. Writing music is not something that everybody can do, but if you can and want to, you should." He stopped and looked at me with deep tenderness (I get my good looks and blue eyes from him), and we both realized that he was close to tears. Then, as quickly as he had come upon me, he turned and walked out of the room.

Today I turned back in to the library: the CD recordings of the Haydn opus 76 quartets, which I had listened to over and over, and which were due back; and the Berg violin concerto and the Schoenberg Variations for orchestra, which I had not listened to at all, and which weren't due for another couple of weeks. After all, why hoard them like a dog in the manger, despising and, yes, fearing them, and not listening to them, when it is possible that persons with less knowledge and taste than myself might find them enjoyable? I doubt even that, but I admit that they might think or imagine them to be enjoyable; and though imaginary (or mistaken) enjoyment is the only enjoyment that subjects of his Imperial Majesty (le Roi Nu)ever have--be it never so little--I certainly wouldn't want to deprive them of it. Another consideration in returning the Berg and Schoenberg CD's unheard, before their due date, is that, had I kept them around, I might actually have put them in my CD player and listened to them, and so inflicted mental anguish on myself in my sacred private space; which, by the tenets (No Unpleasantness in the Home) of my religion, would constitute an abominable profanation. But/and, yes, the most appalling possibility is that I might have enjoyed them (as so many, though wrongly, have done) and so have had to put aside my deepest and most cherished rational/critical prejudgement; which, of course, I would rather die than do.

Who I'm reminding myself of, in this my late hand-wringing pother over having objectively to acknowledge the existence of twelve-tone/atonal "music," are the ingenuous butch miners in Nevada that Oscar Wilde gave lectures to in the 1880's (as described in a letter of Wilde's to his friends back in England); who heard with pleasure and approbation Wilde's fruitiest and poofiest espousal of lily-in-hand estheticism, but who rose as one man when Wilde was describing certain tendencies in modern painting (probably the impressionism practiced by his friend James MacNeil Whistler), and shouted, "This must not be!"

Why I'm Still HIV-Negative

Firstly and foremostly, I count myself plain damned lucky. Secondly, I was never really all that sexually active, even when I could have been, and maybe should have been--I was young, good-looking, healthy; but then, as now, I spent most of my time reading, thinking, walking, and listening to music. Thirdly, largely as a result of my reading and thinking, I was acutely aware of the historical anomaly of there being, for those brief golden three decades of my youth and young manhood, no incurable and fatal sexually transmitted diseases. "We are lucky," I would say to anybody who would listen, "it scares me to think how lucky." Fourthly, I was living outside the primary areas of contamination (in Spokane) when the plague hit. I remember the night at a "Family party" in the early 80's when my friend and mentor Bill Weaver showed me an article in (I think it was) Psychology Today about the new "queer cancer." Fifthly, my Guardian Spirit actually had a hand in keeping me safe--as the following anecdote will illustrate:

In July of 1980, when the Virus was spreading in San Francisco, Key West, and New York, but nobody knew it yet, and I was still trim and beautiful, I took the train to San Francisco to visit my friend Gary Darling and to attend the San Francisco Opera production of Don Giovanni, with Cesare Siepi singing the title role--impossible to describe the magic of that voice, or the excitement of hearing my favorite opera in company of an entire operahouseful of people who knew the opera as well as I did--and who even laughed at the jokes in the rapid Italian of the recitativi. Musically it was, as I had hoped, the high point of my life. But sexually I had a terrible time. During the several days of my visit I went to the baths, the clubs, the exhibition bars--the raunchiest, randiest that ever they were--and I did not once get laid. Every night I would go out determined at least to get fucked (What, besides a little hygienic preparation, could that cost me?), and every morning I would come back to Gary's apartment and crawl into bed beside my friend and dear sister utterly defeated and totally unrequited. What was wrong with me? I felt like the worst failure in the world. Finally, rather than face more such humiliation (not that I was being rejected--I just couldn't get into it), I gave it up and took the train back to Spokane....

And on the way back--If I were making this up, I would have made this part of my trip to San Francisco, not from--I stopped and stayed for a couple of days at Crater Lake. Those who don't know the Pacific Coast, who don't know the vulcanism that underlies the land from Western British Columbia to Northern California, who suppose that Crater Lake is just a lake--those who are not from the Pacific Northwest--cannot conceive what it is to immerse oneself in the still, awful presence of that place. I spent the night on the rim (8,000 ft.) seeing the mid-summer stars overhead and reflected in the lake. The next morning I descended into the crater of the long-ago explosion of Mount Mazama and took the tourist excursion boat around the lake filled with frigid liquid sapphire. When the boat stopped at Wizard Island, I skinned down to the the bikini swimsuit I'd worn under my clothes (How slim we were in those days!) and jumped in off the dock. The near-freezing water was brutal, punishing. I stayed in only for a couple of minutes, coming out of it feeling that I had braved an incalculable force and luckily been annealed rather than destroyed. And so, I think, my Guardian Spirit was appeased or satisfied.

More Imperial Nudity (and Sacred Untruths)

The "Cold War," with all its attendant fascist lunacies: "Protecting ourselves from Communist Aggression," the Arms Race, "Mutually Assured Destruction," the "Nuclear Umbrella." The Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The "Terrorist Attack" on 9/11/2001. The First "War in the Gulf" (boy, did Jean Baudrillard get that one right--it didn't happen). Pretending that Abraham Lincoln was not personally responsible for the single bloodiest conflict in American history--no wonder he suffered from depression. "The only use for Q-Tips is cleaning our noses and the outsides of our ears." Where do you begin? Last first: I once had a licensed medical doctor try to tell me that in order to get rid of the wax deposit in my ear canals I needed to swab them out with Q-Tips after every shower or bath--only he couldn't bring himself to say so; Conventional (or Sacred) Unwisdom holding it that Q-tips must never, on any account, be inserted even very gingerly in the ear canal. What he wound up saying was, "You know, after you bathe, you could take Q-tips and...you know...not put them in your ears but...The wax is softer then...And you could maybe...You know...."

Spent the morning for the first time in my life listening to (reading the libretto along with) Handel's oratorio Samson: a wonderfully rich, allusive experience, comparable in a very different way to Semele and Israel in Egypt. What's richly wonderful and allusive about Samson is Handel's musical evocation of Milton's play, just as Semele faithfully mirrors, provides the sonic equivalent of scene-painting for the wit and pith of Congreve, and Israel in Egypt is the very sum and substance of the Old Testament. Whyever am I dabbling in such vile nothings as twelve-tone "music"? I guess the answer is: Homo sum.

des Mémoires d'Anatole Nozière

sequel to the blogs of April 11, 2006 and November 27, 2007

A couple of months after the Great Apostasy of my eleventh year, in the month of May (I remember that the lilacs were in bloom), I participated (competed? performed?) in the Greater Spokane Musical Festival, as one of Mrs. Osbourne's more promising piano students. Preparation had begun two or three months before. In order to demonstrate well-roundedness (Something about the very notion of that put my back up--and still does) of taste and technique, we were given two pieces, one "classical," and one "romantic," to learn by heart. There was some allowance for personal preference in the selection of the classical piece; but little or none in the choice of the romantic piece. So, gladly enough, I chose a Rameau menuet in G Minor for the former, and, with considerable feeling of being put upon, was given the Chopin prelude in E Minor for the latter. The Rameau was a breeze; I had it memorized within a week, and spent the rest of time polishing it, mastering the ornaments, terrace dynamics, and trills-like-a-jack-hammer. But the Chopin, even with the music in front of me, was a disaster; next to the elegant, vigorous, articulate Rameau, I found it cloyingly sweet, vulgarly emotional, "stupid," and indeed romantic. I would not, could not memorize it--not even with the performance date coming up and doom and Mrs. Osbourne's reputation riding on it.

Came the day, I was miserable, not having slept the night before for worry, wearing a hot, itchy woolen suit and strangling bow-tie. In utter despair, I mounted the platform, and when my turn had come (I was fifth in a performance-group of ten), I bowed to the adjudicators and to the assembled parents and teachers and took my place at the keyboard of the nine-foot Steinway grand. The first piece, the Rameau, went swimmingly: Fear lent precision and delicacy. Heartened, I began the Chopin prelude, and had played the first five measures, when I realized that I had not a clue as to what the sixth measure should be: my Doom had come. So, without missing a beat, I began to improvise. I no longer remember what. But methinks I may have made a half cadence of the whiny original material, modulated into G Major for a contrasting poco allegretto B-section, and brought back the beginning for an extended coda in E-Minor. With my heart in my mouth, I rose and bowed to slightly nervous and uncertain applause, and took my seat among my fellow victims waiting for judgement.

There was a long pause after the final performance, while the three soberly dressed middle-aged adjudicators shuffled their notes and whispered together; then the chief among them, a tall and distinguished forty-something man with a rather austere expression from whom I expected no mercy, rose, faced the assemblage and began to speak: "I particularly want to congratulate two of our young performers today: Susie Mullen for a wonderfully skillful and delicately expressive rendering of both her Classical and the Romantic pieces...and Anatole Nozière." He went on then for nearly fifteen minutes, praising (such praise as I have never earned before or since--well, maybe once since: See blog 4/6/08, "Whoring and Lusting after Romanticism mit Schlag") my musicianship and my pluck, telling stories of other musicians with the ("rare, precious") gift of improvisation who had done as I had done, and winning me at the end of his speech another virtually standing ovation, while I went from pale to pink and back again.

Afterwards, the two most important women in my life, my mother and Mrs. Osbourne, could scarcely contain themselves for joy and wonder at me. And yet, and yet... For all the pleasure of praise heaped on me when I had expected severest censure, a worm of unsatisfied and insatiable desire for recognition of my actual achievment gnawed at the astonishing fraîcheur (I was, on the photograpic evidence, an angelically beautiful boy) of my damask'd eleven-year-old cheek: In all the amazement at my precocious faking of Chopin, my genuinely superb rendition of Rameau was overlooked. And no one asked why I had forgot the Chopin; it was simply assumed that, for some reason, I had been unprepared. No one appreciated that I detested the Chopin piece, and that my negligent improvisation on it was as much as to say, "Anybody with my talent can make up better music than this crap!" At our next piano lesson, I began to intimate as much to Mrs. Osbourne, but the glitter in her eye, and the tongue against her teeth on the side of her mouth (She loved Chopin) gave me to understand that I'd better drop it; another word out of me and there'd be a seismic rift in the Social Fabric. So, swallowing bilious vainglory and implacable contempt, for once, I held my peace.

How I torment myself. I've read a couple of books already this morning at the library: (1) Gordon Delamont's Modern Twelve-Tone Technique and (2) George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality. And, just to fill my cup of bitterness to the brim, I've checked out Berg's so-famous (Elegy for a Dip-Shit Dying Young) "violin concerto," and Schoenberg's endlessly touted "variations for orchestra," and I'm going to take them home and listen to them just as long as can stand them; bearing in mind with appalled incredulity Ethan Mordden's and others' lavish, drooling praise of these works' "emotional beauty and exquisite musicality." I'm prepared to barf. Quote, of perfectly sober, unintentional hilariousness, from Modern Twelve-Tone Technique: "Although the structure of the row is largely a matter of personal choice, there are some points worth noting: 1. Serial music is, by its nature, atonal rather than tonal. That is to say it is not related to standard major and minor scales, and has no central tonic. As a general rule, then, it is wise, when constucting the row, to avoid situations which tend to be traditionally tonal in implication.*  Therefore: a. Avoid arpeggiated major or minor triads, or at least avoid over-using them...Although if the 'key suggestion' of a triad movement is contradicted by the note or notes immediately preceding and immediately following the triad, the key suggestion [no longer in quotes] will be less obvious [my italics]. b. Avoid classically resolved tritones, or other movements that have tonal cadential implications...c. Avoid the tonal suggestion that could arise from too obvious a use of diatonic scale or intervallic patterns [again, my italics]. The above points which are aimed at avoiding a tonal sense in the row, are generally valid [!?]. It should be pointed out, however, that a row which has mild sense of tonality is not necessarily wrong [!]...4. The row can be composed with a particular psychological association in mind, depending on the nature of the proposed composition; e.g., a row can have an open and strong quality due to the use of strong interval leaps, such as 5ths and 4ths..or a row can be subdued and introspective due to the use of interval leaps such as minor 6ths, minor 3rds, and some stepwise motion...."

*But of course, as I understand it, this is precisely what Berg did not do in his much appreciated violin concerto, and throughout the score of Lulu--making, in fact, quite a point of the ambivalence of tonality/atonality, and almost never using the Schoenbergian doctrinaire invariable tone-row in a way that Schoenberg could have approved.  It appears that there are depths of horseshit in the theory and practise of dodecaphony quite similar in bottomless, humorless feculence to the preposterous poop of Freudianism, Social Constructionism, and Postmodernism.  Perfect family likenesses in fact.

Imperial Nudity


So much of the world is utter undoubting horseshit, one hardly knows where to begin; but let us start with psychology: Sheer, preposterous mind-numbing frauds without merit, interest or insight are (1) Carl Gustav Jung and (2) Sigmund Freud, and (3) all their works and followers

The arts, of course, fairly swarm with humbug: from Andy warhol to Jackson Pollock; not to mention poor old Grandma Moses. And, of course, what are we to say about Schoenberg, Berg, Webern (Stockhausen*, Varese, and Boulez), and the whole nauseous idiocy of dodecaphonic/serialism/tone-row "composition," which has duped musicians as competent, variously, as Glenn Gould and Herbert von Karajan, not to mention the millions of patient concert-goers who are persuaded that there is "emotional beauty" in such excrescences as Wozzeck and Lulu--very like the "lovely shade of green" seen by the admirers of the Emperor's new clothes in the Hans Christian Andersen fable.

* Sir Thomas Beecham: "I don't know that I've heard any Stockhausen, but I may have trodden in some."

In the late in the morning at the ophthamologist's office where I have been working as a receptionist, came in for new glasses a tall, distinguished, vivacious woman some years my senior (d'un certain age). For which reasons I asked her, in French, if she spoke French; to which she replied, "Mais je suis française!" And I said, "Non! Parbleu!" And so for the next twenty minutes Geneviève and I had a virtual feast of French wit and Gallic soul. "Oh, my god," she said, in French, "what a relief it is to talk French!" She had a lot of naughty French things to say: how stupid Americans are about sex; how lazy-minded and insular; how nasty and inedible their food (One can't call it Cuisine); how incredible it is that out here in middle of the Pacific Ocean there is only one restaurant that serves really fresh fish--and there (Nicholas's over by CostCo), of course, is where all the French expatriates hang out. How we laughed, how we flirted, both of us nearly in tears at unexpected joy of having somebody civilized to talk to. For the French (a simile that occurred to me while Geneviève and I were talking) living in America is like wearing woolen underwear....