The Secret to having Heav'nly Music to Wake up to

is getting up early on Sunday morning and tuning in the f.m. radio broadcasts from across the continental U.S.A.  So far--while lawful and delicious stimulants have gently percolated through me, and the sun has risen with much pomp and color--I've heard: a Bach cantata (#42), Rameau's suite from Platee, a Corelli sonata, a Vivaldi concerto for two oboes; and, just now, I'm being charmed by a sort of symphonic suite ("sinfonia spirituosa") by Telemann.   Am I a better person for it? Or does such music just make me feel better?  Confucius whom I embarrassingly resemble, and Plato, would have opted for the former.  Less historical personages would say that, because it makes me feel better, Heav'nly Music makes it less likely that I will be bad (People are always forgetting the Lessons of Auschwitz). 

And now an old favorite of mine, and of Kristen's and mine, Mozart's 'Prague' symphony, K. 504 (Isn't K. 503 a piano concerto?  the 'Great' C Major?  Indeed.  I just googled it.  According to Wikipedia, K's 503 and 504 were written "side by side."  Fascinating.  Except for being works of sublime genius and absolute mastery, they are nothing alike.  Only Shakespeare and Beethoven, that I can think of, have "side by side"s of similarly suggestive power.)  Perfect Music--which raises some really interesting esthetic questions which cross over into being ethical questions:   (1) Is anything else, in the same sense, Music?  (2) If it isn't, why listen to it?  [We'll get back to Mozart in a minute.  Just now to note, that the sly music programmers have put on Bach's double D Minor violin concerto--as if to answer the question of what, besides Mozart, is Music?]  Applying the inherently anachronistic irrelevance of Postmodernist Feminist "discourse" to the vitreous, nonsexual "text" of the 'Prague' symphony, I think we must ask ourselves (as, I'm sure, Luce Irigaray would ask herself), "Is it fair?"  There is, as was often noted in his day, a chilling, mocking "demonic clangour" in Mozart's music, "privileged" in its very essence, which makes no accommodation for the innately human needs of dancing-to, singing-along-with, and talking-over.  Such music seems designed to inhibit, frustrate, and ultimately to devalue us by making us aware of our inconsequence.       

From an Early Age

I took the business of educating myself with uncompromising seriousness.  From the beginning, I plunged into history and the sciences, consciously anchoring myself in temporal and material reality.  By the time I was nine years old I knew the names of the planets and had some idea of the scale of the solar system, as well as how long it had been since the Golden Age of Greece and Rome.  When a Fairy Godfather, in the shape of my father's cousin Harold, summoned my father and me, aged ten, to the Ancestral Seat outside Moscow, Idaho and bestowed upon me, with thrilling solemnity, the entire set of The Book of Knowledge (virtually a child's Encyclopaedia Britannica), I fully appreciated, and was grateful for, Cousin Harold's almost supernaturally percipient recognition of my genius and my vocation--and maybe for the first time also I saw myself-entire, and knew, "as though the chart were given," the purpose of my existence.   It goes almost without saying that the Book of Knowledge became my meat and drink, what I took to bed with me, and what I got up with in the morning; winter and summer, indoors and outdoors, day and night, for the next two and a half years, I had always a volume of the Book of Knowledge with me--reading, and re-reading.  It was from it that I knew the history of Italian art, music and architecture which made me and my Italian uncle, for a while, social equals and allies.   It was the Book of Knowledge, really, that made it possible for me to "coast" through the subsequent fifty years of my formal education, absolutely secure in the knowledge of what things are, what they're made of, and, even more importantly, when things are, and what character they have. 

Being a Snob

I knew that one Armistead Maupin had written stuff that was well and widely received--by nobody that I respected or cared about--in its televised (ick!) version, by the name of 'Tales of the City,' and generally that it was about gay men and AIDS in San Francisco.  I even knew that Olivia Dukakis had a big role in it.  Something else, akin to my infallible Gaydar, also told me that Maupin was a Conservative, probably Effeminate, Aristocrat from Back East (double ick!): How could such a one understand, much less convey, the Divine Essence and Sacred Tragedy of My Holy City?  So, of course, I never watched it on television, and I turned away, from all reading and discussion of Maupin and his impious, presumptuous profanation, with the jaw-set and the eyes-glazed of one ignoring a fart-joke or a fart.

Then, a few months ago, I read H.L. Mencken's extraordinarily perceptive little essay on San Francisco--and a certain prejudice deep within me started, if not to crumble, to soften.

And then, of course, as recently as yesterday, I read the very essence-of-San-Francisco-revealed (by a native of Peoria!) in Some Dance to Remember.

And so at last, a few minutes ago, I wotthehell googled Armistead Maupin and actually read his wonderful essay entitled 'First Impressions of The City.'   I have, in the minutes since, got online to my account with the Hawaii State Library and put just about everything that Maupin wrote about San Francisco on reserve, and hope to be reading it tomorrow morning.

Finished

Some Dance to Rermember, as I'd hoped to, well before dark.  What a story!   What a perfectly logical and satisfying, yet totally surprising, denouement!  My dread fears that the hero would simply up and die of AIDS--after protracted torments, of course, and with universal darkness burying all; and that would be the bleak and sordid end of it--fortunately for my psychic well-being, did not happen.  Instead, I'm actually feeling, damn it all, uplifted, charmed, and not a little thrilled and touched.  

The Exterminators are Coming!

Seriously. Cockroach Control is going to be here in a couple of hours to bait or fog and spray this my 3rd floor here at the W------g H--e. In the more than half a year I've been here, I've seen, in this my studio-haven, exactly two of the Carboniferous (just googled it--I got it right) relicts--and I dealt with them, swiftly and venomously, using the insecticide that I sometimes, since the Horrid Bedbug Infestation, spray around and under my bed and behind the refrigerator....


Trying to listen to Borodin's Symphony #1--I'd expected something somehow less trendily uptodate and pointlessly Frenchified (But there, just a whiff of 'Stranger in Paradise') and more like, I fondly hoped, that first movement of a string quartet of his I heard once long ago as mickey mouse music in a video about something entirely else--and loved. This reminds me, for all the world, of Gershwin/Ravel. And I hate it. Everything on NPR this morning, however, is gawdawful modernity: Huge orchestras with percussion sections like military enclaves. There ought to be a word for the kind of modulation that is always insisting on the augmented fourth or exposed tritone, and for the kind of melodic development which, in a sort of pseudophony, layers (invariably trite, short-breathed, asthmatic) tunes over one another (easy to do with an orchestra that size) like a patisserie millefeuille.  God how I hate it. How I hate it especially in the morning, when all I want is clarity, grace, simplicity.....So, everything on all seven classical music stations being hateful, I've been listening to John Adams' "award-winning" violin concerto (under the NPR rubric: "John Adams Revitalizes the Violin Concerto"): Four minutes into it, it's so horrible, so very unpleasant, such a waste of musicians' time and abilities--I wish it were a live performance, so I could walk out on it. At the ten minute mark, I'm gone, wishing I had heard less.


Ongoing reading of Some Dance to Remember--I should finish it today--reveals the consummate lapidary craft and limpid stylistics of its author, who, among other things, remains (when he wants to be) the world's greatest pornographer: The levels of point de vue in the sexual relations between our hero Ryan O'Hara and his lovers (including, very kinkily, his own natural brother--and not his sister, whom he won't fuck, to her great despite, simply and only because she's a girl) is dazzling, kaleidoscopic.

Some Dance to Remember

I started reading this last night--really reading, reading every word. It came back to me that I had begun it some months ago--and put it aside, finding it wasn't pornography, and pornography, then (a la Gordon Merrick), was what I wanted. What a superficial asshole I am sometimes. Anyway, last night and this morning I got into it: I'm enthralled like I haven't been since Mordden's "Buddy" novels. I've already (not yet as far as 100 pages) found stuff in it that speaks to my heart and my own experience in a way that Mordden isn't even close to. I was there, in San Francisco, then...It's like looking at home movies. And more. I googled Jack Fritscher and found that we share more than history: (item) Fritscher wrote that lovely hard-core porn short-story Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O'Malley that I long ago jacked off over, and over--and was astonished that Dan Savage, even, mentioned it as being very hot, in either The Kid or Commitment. Of course I never remember the authors' names of the one-handed fiction, whether I get off on it or not, so it comes as quite a delightful surprise. (item) In interview, Fritscher says about AIDS, exactly what I say, that: a "corporation," probably, invented it and set it loose in Africa, thus ending the Party, or, if you prefer, Golden Age.  (item) Fritscher's "homomasculinity" is in essence all that I've been blogging about lately; including yesterday's rant on the sick feeling you get when you fuck a man who's not masculine--and what an important part of sex is mental, psychic even.

Direct Perception

Now pretty much generally conceded, but nowhere much talked about, is the fact that Masculinity (whatever it is) and Femininity (whatever) are directly perceivable (See 'Gaydar' 2/28/08).  It's something that every gay man experiences:  How many, many times before I went off to San Francisco and at last found all the sex I wanted whenever I wanted it with other butch young men, did I, too horny and needy, go ahead and have-sex-anyway with women trapped in men's bodies!   Hoping at least that if I fucked them on their stomachs I wouldn't be able to see the nauseating, cloying, pathetic female things they were (inside).  It never worked.  I always felt afterwards like a zoophile:  You've fucked your ewe, bitch, mare, or cow--now what do you say to her?

Trying to be Objective, Striving to be Fair...

Andreas G. Philaretou and Katherine R. Allen together wrote an article for the April 30th, 2001 issue of the Journal of Men's Studies, entitled "Reconstructing Masculinity," from which I quote the beginning of the authors' Summary: 

"This paper attempts to synthesize general issues pertaining to masculinity and male sexuality using essentialist and postmodern theoretical ideologies.  According to essentialist ideologies, the construction of male gender requires one's molding into a masculine role, which presupposes autonomy, competition, and aggressiveness, and the suppression of the innate human needs for connectedness, intimacy, and self-disclosure, which have been traditionally devalued as feminine traits...."  Our gentle authors then go on to postulate what they call the "alternative" postmodern ideology, which would entail the deconstruction of those "essentialist notions of male sexuality" and the "reconstruction of a more balanced androgynous ideology drawing from the historical, social, and cultural determinants of sexuality...."  They do go on, saying sillier and sillier things, derived apparently from the then still flourishing idiocies of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault of course; but let us stop here and consider what our authors have so-far achieved in the way of Fairness and Balance.  Beginning with the statement, "According to essentialist ideologies"--might it not have been appropriate to say here which "essentialist ideologies"? or to say, "generally speaking"?  Then the kicker, anyway, according to those essentialist ideologies (whosoever's they may be) "the construction of male gender requires one's molding into a masculine role...."  Just a fucking minute.  (1)  Only in the imaginations of women and the unmanly do essentialist ideologies hold that "male gender is a construction," or that it "requires molding into a masculine role."  That's a lot of horseshit in a little space.  In fact, essentialists believe--or, more precisely, intuit--that male gender is a given, not a construction.  And there is (2) no "molding into" (with connotations of force and coercion) a masculine role, but rather the spontaneous and effortless adoption of masculine roles as the natural consequence and expression of our innate masculinity which is coterminous with our biologically determined male gender.  That said, our gentle authors have a gratuitously inhuman, nasty and weird notion of what an essential masculine role "presupposes."  "Autonomy"--all right, though I think (maybe with just a smidgen of insincere chivalry) it's more of a human thing than specifically masculine.   But "competition, and aggressiveness, and the suppression [?] of innate [Who's the essentialist?] human needs for connectedness[?], intimacy, and self-disclosure [!?]"!?   What the fuck are "competition and aggressiveness"?  They sound like bad manners to me.  And the funny little list of "innate human needs," which sounds more like "ethics for immodest parasites," would certainly give women a bad name ("de-value" them) if those were their characteristic "needs."   But enough already. 

If you dig back through today's blog, you'll see that I've pretty well outlined what I believe to be the the correct essentialist view of men and masculinity--but almost, as it were, in silhouette, and, once again, by demonstrating that what men are, and the masculinity that informs and animates them, is inconceivable to women and unmanly men.

 

One Recoils, of course, with Indignation and Disgust

from the social construction assigned by women and pussy-men to the masculine character of normal men.  Yet one can appreciate that for themselves the concept seems to work.   They seem in fact to be, as they claim to be, licked into the shapes they wear, by their mothers and the powers they worship.   And perhaps, as they seem about to insist, their amorphous pliancy is as deserving of respect as the normally constituted male's sense of himself-entire.  For the sake of argument, let it be granted.   It might then also be that their mischaracterization of men is less malicious than simply mistaken; less willfully defamatory than merely an attempt to explain the unaccountably and uncannily alien by familiar analogy--in the same way that women's fiction, "clit lit" (if men could but restrain their distaste for it long enough to view it objectively), may be seen to consist in one long, erroneous, but hopeful disquisition on the nature of men.  It may be that the truth, however salutary, cannot be borne:  "Mother, why did Johnny punch me in the stomach?"--"It's because of your Fatal Beauty, my child, etc.," for example, is an answer that soothes and satisfies. While Johnny's explanation, "To keep her from sitting next to me," though brutally factual, exceeds a girl's (and her mother's) capacity to understand; seems in fact, to the female mind, to raise more questions than it answers.

The Dream of the Fair Aude

The age of a boy ago, I was given the assignment, in a college class studying the Chanson de Roland, of imagining what went through 'the Fair Aude's' mind when she heard the news of her fiance Roland's death, and sank down into a swoon.  Translated, it went something like this:

[messenger]:  "Roland is dead, Madame."

Aude:  "And Olivier, my brother?"

[messenger]: "Alas, Madame, dead too."

Aude:  "And shall Roland die--and my brother Olivier!--and I yet live?  Alas!"  For the first time in my life I belong to no one!  I must think..."Alas! And I yet live?"  I close my eyes--so.  Incline my head--thus.  They think I've fainted...And I have time to think.  Ah, the world which concerns itself so little with women somehow never imagines that, by depriving us of any particular right to live,  it exempts us from obligatory death.  Poor Roland!  So beautiful in his shining armor--and up close, so pitifully unclean!  Really he didn't love me so much as he loved my brother, in me....That English monk whom the Emperor brought over to teach us Latin, in teaching me how to read, he taught me to know myself.  Things weren't always thus..In the time of Alexander and of Caesar, women often lived for themselves.  Alone, I might travel as far as Constantinople..They know the language of the Romans there.  Who knows but that I shall find a life for myself as well.  Very well then, I shall "waken."  "And yet I live!"

My professor, a very nice, intelligent, and, as it happens, a very beautiful woman, was enormously impressed.  She wrote things on my paper like "Quel bel argument!  Cela montre une érudition impressionante, de la part de la belle Aude, et de son créateur.  On dit, 'Femme instruite, femme dangéreuse'!"  She also praised its exemplary Feminism.  Which surprised and perplexed me.  Somehow I doubted that my having turned the Fair Aude into Margaret Fuller would find favor with feminists.   And I doubt it today even more.  

Today it's Asia in the News

The Taiwanese have elected themselves a pro-Beijing opposition candidate for president.  Holi, the Spring Festival, is being celebrated throughout the Indian subcontinent--they won't feel this unified again till the Monsoon rains come at the end of summer.  Arthur C. Clark, who only just a few years ago announced he'd been queer all his life, died and was obsequied in Sri Lanka, at the age of ninety. Would it've helped if it'd been a "Gay Space Odyssey"?  Dunno.  I saw it when it came out (stoned on acid of course) on a double bill with Lonesome Cowboys; it seemed to fit. Many a rose-lipped lad lost his cool over Keir Dullea, who was hot.

Fickle Fecal Fashion

To be fair, there's nothing inherently sillier or more fraudulent in Freud than in any of the other so-called "depth-psychologists."  Adler's crippled snobbism, Jung's hysterical esotericism, Neumann's fatuous autogynephilia--all certainly have their several places in history's oblivious ashcan.  To what then shall we attribute Freud's former pre-eminence and late, uneasy universal discredit?  I think we can put it down to Freud's incomparably more malignant nastiness--which the Vulgar Many always confound with Profundity--and, more particularly, to his invention of the word and concept of "fecal play."  

 Fashions come and go, but Freud has been popular, and will continue to be popular, just as James Joyce and the comte de Sade will always be popular, among those who continue to relish any occasion to dwell on the end product of digestion.      

My Enemies' Enemy

I have four books by Frederick Crews just now checked out of the beautiful Hawaii State Library: Skeptical Engagements, Follies of the Wise, Postmodern Pooh, and The Critics Bear It Away. Instead of reading them, however, what I've been doing is googling the delicious quarrels that Crews has engaged in, and provoked, in Modern Arts and Letters.  Essentially (tiny pun) I have nothing to add.  What he said.  I don't even have to think any more about Freud--or Lacan, or Derrida, or Foucault.  Crews has done them all in, done them to a crisp, leaving their apologists saying wonderfully silly, desperate things--for all the world, with their hissing and cackling and shrieking--like a flock of pompous, know-nothing geese among whom a stick has been thrown.     

The Rights of Women

Among the benefits that thoughtful reactionaries might have claimed for the Ancien Regime--had they not instead been pursuing the retrospective chimeras of Divinely Ordained Subordination and Natural Piety--was that of the Absolute Social and Moral Equality of the Sexes which obtained from the 16th through the 18th centuries (though only among the upper classes, to be sure).  That this fragile bloom of civilization was due only to the total absence of Political Equality, and that it meant social and moral equality both for good and ill, is inarguable; yet the last two centuries of feudalism were, arguably, the last epoch in the Western World during which women consciously felt themselves to be, and were treated like, complete human beings in their own right.  One might have thought that so just, humane, and useful a principle as the equality of one half of mankind with the other would have only to obtain political acknowledgement for it to prevail. When came the Revolution, many...aristocrats...thought the time for that acknowledgement had come:  among them, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, noted libertarian, abolitionist, social scientist, and author of The Rights of Man, who in fact employed his last days in prison under the Terror, before he was sent to the guillotine, drafting a complementary, and utterly charming, Rights of Women.  Alas, it was not to be.

Ask any Frenchman--he will tell you that Louis XVI, and, significantly, his consort, the Austrian born Marie Antoinette, were traitors, who put their dynastic interests above their obligations as rulers  of the French nation.   And so they were.   Louis was thinking only of his patrimony, and Marie Antoinette only of her children--and in the meantime France was surrounded by a Grand Alliance of powers determined to invade it and to throttle the Revolution in its cradle. With War abroad and Terror at home, that vast effusion of French blood known as the Napoleonic Wars had begun.  Under the Terror, from 1793 through Thermidor 1794, The Committee of Public Safety would be filling the prisons with everyone it could lay its hands on, anyone who could by any stretch of the imagination be labelled "Agent of the Foreign Enemy"--and emptying them on the Place de la Guillotine.  But in the years before it was simply the Mob who ruled, "watering" the streets of Paris (where there were hardly any "furrows") with the "impure blood"  of "aristocratic whores."  When news reached Paris in late August 1792 of the fall of Verdun to the Prussian armies, the princesse de Lamballe, former companion to Marie Antoinette, and mistress of her household, was among the 1,200 prisoners (half the number of those then imprisoned in Paris) who were slain "with unspeakable barbarities," according to a British diplomatic envoy who witnessed part of it, in the so-called "September Massacres."  Upon her refusal to take an oath against the Monarchy, the princess was handed over to a band of ruffians armed with swords and pikes who raped, lynched, (the sequence is not clear) and "sexually mutilated" her body, which was then decapitated and the head, "bloody but recognizable," mounted upon a pike and paraded beneath the Queen's windows at the Temple.  To her credit, the Queen fainted.  Then came Robespierre and "Republican Virtue," and nothing more was heard in France, until 1945--after the Allied victory in World War II--of the Rights of Women.

Heterosexual Tyranny

The commonest form of it, one that all men, gay or straight, walking alone, experience sooner or later, is being "bumped"--run off a narrow sidewalk by a heterosexual couple. Like most tyrannical acts which deny personhood, it is usually committed obliviously and inadvertently. Absorbed in one another, and themselves, to the point of forgetting their public presence--and their manners--the young (not always!), typically American, het couple will push you to the wall, or drive you into the street, most often without noticing what they've done, and never with any apology. Women, happily for them, unless they're extraordinarily unattractive, seldom get ignored--or "bumped"--the way that a hapless single male does.

Historical Note: One of the "peculiar institutions" that poisoned the sweetness of living before 1789--not the only thing, of course, but certainly among the more keenly resented of aristocratic abuses--were the bâtonneurs, the liveried thugs that walked ahead of Dukes and Princes of the Blood in the streets, knocking people (men, women, and children) out of the way with cudgels.

Being Scotch-Irish (on St. Patrick's Day)

Many of my dumb-ass, anhistorical compatriots, like me, are Scotch-Irish; they suppose that makes them Irish.  I almost wish it did.  The true, complicated story of how the Protestant Scots came, under the Scotch-English Stuart dynasty, to supplant the Catholic Irish on their own lands, to take all their stuff, and drive them naked and starving into the hedgerows and ditches, is bitter and unedifying.  But that's the racial heritage that most Americans unwittingly (of course!) are celebrating on this dumb-ass American "Irish" holiday.  That's why I, though proud to be descended from Moses Moore and his child-bride Ellen Rockhill ("Irish as Paddy's pig" my mother used to say of their names), wear no green on St. Patrick's Day.   Besides, we Moores and Rockhills (Flemings and Gleasons) arrived in America a long while before the Potato Famine refugees, and were already calling ourselves Sons of the American Revolution, which we were.  What we thought of the new, poor, desperate, Catholic "Sons of the Old Sod" is probably what most Protestant Americans who were already here thought of them--not much. When then they invented St. Patrick's Day so they could march around and drink green beer and feel good about themselves, we kindly, if a little tepidly, wished them the joy of it.  But really it'd've been too hypocritical of us to join in.

Back to Bed, More Sweet/Sad Dreams...And Now: Born too Late

Listening, through my "Tunes Application" (whatever the bloody hell that is) to a flute concerto that seemed at first agreeably classical (in the late 18th century sense) and effortlessly, charmingly melodious.  And then...One began to notice that the charming tunes had no "suite."  They came one after another, sure enough, but none grew out of itself into something else.  And the orchestra, one noted first with anxiety, and finally with exasperation, had nothing to say for itself--was just sort of there, holding things up, like male dancers in ballet.  What fatal lack of intelligent regard for melodic development, proportion and balance, had turned this work, so pretty in its tunes and solo part, into a dreary, one-dimensional hurdy-gurdy?   The answer, my dears, is  The Climate of The Times, Romanticism, in which only stupendously gifted Titans like Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and then but seldom and rarely, could conceive of the balance of melody, development and proportion which is essential to the composition of a successful concerto for soloist and orchestra, and which, certainly, was beyond the grasp of minor talents like Chopin--or, in this case, Franz Danzi (1763-1826), who, had he but been born twenty years sooner, would have been a very good composer, possibly (such were his melodic gifts) even great.  Not to fault the great Romantic concertos that did get written; but they are few. 

Just listened on WGUG to that famous Miserere of Allegri's which the 12-year-old Mozart famously copied out from memory after hearing it once or twice (twelve parts?): very pretty, not at all what I'd expected from its patronizing description by musicologists and Mozart biographers of the first half of the 20th Century--so blinded and deafened as these were by their own notions of "greatness" and "genius," that they could scarcely actually see or hear anything which they (or some "received authority") had not pre-determined to possess those (very Romantic) qualities.

A Dream

Media Noctis.  I've just risen from a long, sad realistic dream about my mother's brother's family--so many, so long dead.  I was talking with ghosts, and knew it, in my grandfather's house at Pampa.  Can it still be standing?  Unlikely.  It was old long ago.  In the dream the house was simply falling apart, and the cousins, long dead, that I was talking to about long ago times and people, faded into the silent twilight when a living person (presumably), my cousin Gwendollyn Susan Fleming came in.  What must her name be now?  If she's still alive, she'll be a woman in her fifties, a mother and  grandmother, and handsome, if she takes after  her mother, my Aunt Della. Oh, so much, gently and solemnly, this dream has laid to rest.   

Furthermore

Let's just go, for a while, with the negative character of innate, butch and manly, masculinity. You have, though, first, to get your mind around Colette's "[La] pudeur d'homme, presque toujours plus delicate et plus sincere que [celle des femmes]."  "Pudeur" is almost impossible to translate.  It means "modesty," yes--but the French already have that word, and they'd use it if "modesty" were all they meant.  It also means, or implies, "chaste/prudent/bashful reserve," or even "purity" or "chastity."  It is that part of themselves which men feel violated (encroached upon with violence) when they are forced (by females or imperious circumstance): to tango or fox-trot; to watch ballet, musical theater, or women's gymnastics; to attend church, wedding or baby showers; to carry a woman's purse; to "share" in the sense of "impart" or "divulge;" to consider the facts or the material consequence of menstruation.  There can be no doubt that Masculinity in this sense is Misogynist, defining itself by what it is glad it is not.  Straight men, wanting nooky, conceal it; gay men, not wanting nooky, don't have to.

    

Being a Man

Much mucking about, slogging, via the Internet, through the unreason of the Pretentious Many on the subject of Masculinity (Who gives a fuck about femininity?  But wherever you've got a nice thread going on the subject of men and why they act the way they do--comes forth some knuckle-dragging female telling the whole world, over and over again, why she does not shave her legs as a symbol of her resistance to the 'Patriarchy,' and what her legs look like unshaven from several different perspectives, and why, once again, it's an insult to her femininity to shave them), I've discovered that there are two basic views of Masculinity:  (the only probably true and scientific one, that it's something innate in the character of most men) Essentialism, and (utter horseshit, piped through the sewer of Foucault from the original dungpit of Freud, by women who envy, hate and fear it, and men who never had much of it and so are anxious to deny that anybody else did either, e.g., John Stoltenberg and Michael S. Kimmel) Social Constructionism.  God what lengths the unmanly will go to, to assuage what must be the dreadful certainty at their hollow centers that they are silly, weak and contemptible!   Well, just to hasten their implosion--not that you'd want to come to me for testosterone implants or anything--I am and always have been Masculine.  Partly or mostly, it's a negative thing, sure, and it means that I have no Feminine Nature (even my Gay Nature is Butch); and indeed I would despise myself and try to compensate for it if I thought I did have some taint of the feminine; because, frankly, effeminate men and nasty women repulse me as strongly as sexy masculine men attract me.  And let's not even approach the subject of autogynephilia, transsexualism, and Lorena Bobbit.  Transphobe is what I am--and keep away from me!   Still,

I may have gone too fast.  Vanity, incuriosity, and a certain incapacity for reflection have led to some major misconceptions about men among women and the curious fellows that emulate them.  Women, and their imitators, commonly suppose, for example, that, because men make less display of their feelings than women, they feel less, and less sympathetically, than women do.  And, counting the display of feeling a vanity too insignificant to quibble over, men seldom bother to contradict this doubtful, if not false, assessment of their affective natures.  Yet it must be allowed that certain feelings, stronger than any we see exhibited  by women or effeminate males, are the hallmark of unalloyed virility; chief among them the horror that all true men have of genital mutilation.  A man (or a woman) who would do that to a penis is not only somebody we don't want to know, he (or she) is someone we'd just as soon know nothing about.     

Supporting our Troops: I'll hold them up--You, please, shoot them.

Simultaneously blogging this dawning morning, and listening to Monteverdi's Orfeo on National Public Radio: What a lovely computer I have!   Don't much care for the original-instrument astringency and paucity of real Monteverdi; so have switched to a classical music station in Minneapolis: had been Mozart, and is now Ravel, 'Introduction and Allegro' for (as I hear it) harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet--if we must have modern music, this is the modern music to have.  And now a Boccherini guitar quintet:  Heaven! 

Speaking of what our Troops in Iraq are up to, one Arwa Damon, on the opening page of CNN.com, says, "It's not the three and four digit numbers that sicken you.  It's details. Monsters disguised as men scrape skin off bodies, gouge through eyes and yank out fingernails.  That's what gives meaning to thousands tortured in Iraq...." 

Who? What?

You have to pay very close attention.  What was sure as sure a few months or years ago is, somehow, now--you can't tell, even, when the change occurred--maybe not at all just the way things are.  One thing though, Kinsey seems to have got it basically right.  For all the mistiness, the intuitiveness, the skewed/flawed data-base, the subjectivity of his research, Kinsey's original guesstimate still stands:  About fifteen percent of men and five per cent of women are homosexual.  And if you add that together and divide by two, that's ten per cent of the population:  A significant figure because ten per cent is about how many are left-handed, color-blind, alcoholic: normal/standard deviance. There are still problems, inherent distortions, heterogeneous and dichotomous comparisons (for just one thing, "female homosexuality" is totally unlike "male homosexuality," by any standard of comparison)--but, after all, Kinsey got it about right.  And latest scientific research is always proving it.  But what also hasn't changed is the glacial, saurian tenacity of heterosexualist (ninety per cent of the population, after all) unwillingness to believe it.

And so, first thing, Kinsey's figures got drastically whittled (let us not even bother to say by whom, or for what ostensible, or for what surreptitious, actual reasons); one "more objective" study after another reduced the percentage of "exclusively homosexual" men, from about 15% to about 3.7% (or "between 1% and 4%"). And there it seemed to remain, and to be likely to remain,  forever--very much despite one's own subjective or intuitive certitude that "There are way more of us than that!"  And then (though I didn't run across it until just a few days ago, googling "straight men, gay sex"):

The september 19th, 2006, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine published a report of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, entitled "Discordance between Sexual Behavior and Self-Reported Identity, a Population-Based Survey of [4,193 foreign-born and native] New York Men."  The results:

    1.   10% of self-identified "straight" men have sex only with other men.

    2.   10% of "straight" men have had sex with at least one man in the last year.

    3.   10% of married men also have sex with men.

    4.   70% of "straight" men who have sex with other men are married.

    5.   Only 54% of "straight" men who have sex with women are married.

Other results of the survey which the NYCDHMH either could not or would not interpret:

     1.   More "straight" men who had sex with men were foreign-born (than native),

               and they were more likely not to live in Manhattan.

     2.   "Straight" men who had sex with men had fewer partners than "gay" men.

     3.   "Straight" men who had sex with men had fewer sexually transmitted diseases

               than "gay" men.

     4.   "Straight" men were more likely not to use condoms than "gay" men.

Not to be belaboring any points here (perish the thought!), but the sum--of 10% of all "straight" men who only have sex with other men, Plus 10% of all "straight" men who have had sex with at least one man in the last year, plus 10% of all married men, plus the 70% of "straight" men that have sex with other men that are married (unless my high school algebra fails me)--is Considerably More Than 10%.  And add it to the "1%-to-4%" of outright self-identified "gays"--and there we have: our old ball-park original Kinsey guesstimate of about 15%.  Whatta you know.

But we're not done yet. Not only are there more gay males than anybody, even gay males, wanted to believe, there are fewer bisexual males than everybody, including self-defined bisexual males, had hoped.   According to a very well conducted study of J. Michael Bailey's,  which measured penile engorgement in response to homosexual and heterosexual images, three quarters of the men who claimed to be bisexual are homosexual; one quarter, heterosexual.  Instances of men being aroused by both homo-erotic and hetero-erotic images are so rare as to be statistically insignificant.  

What this means, boys and girls, is that the ten per cent of men who call themselves straight and have sex exclusively with other men, as well as the ten per cent of all men who are married that have sex with other men--while they are having sex with men, or thinking about it, they are only interested in having sex with men; the idea of a three-way with their wives does not appeal.  I think we might call them serial homosexuals, making all due allowance for their definition of themselves as "straight."

For what it's worth, of course, and as much interest as there is in it, women, both straight and Lesbian, seem to be quite naturally bisexual.  And there's another reason not to try to compare the sexes.   

We Were Not Amused...Still Aren't

Oh, what the hell.  I just listened on YouTube to Enrico Caruso's famous version of 'Vesti la Giubba,' recorded (can you believe it?) almost exactly 101 years ago.  I'm used to it by now, having over the course of the years heard, variously, Placido Domingo's and Luciano Pavarotti's versions of Pagliacci.  I can't say yet that I exactly like the verismo saga of melodramatic adultery and murder, but it no longer horrifies, disgusts, and appalls...not like it did at first.

My Uncle Ray Yusi (see blog 11/24/07) did what he could on visits to his father-in-law to put distance between himself and my grandfather.  Basically, his strategy, which upstaged and shut out that horrible old man (who, vile pussy-man that he was, really hated, and was unpleasant to, all his sons, sons-in-law, and  grandsons), was to plunge into loud, happy interactions with all the children present, his own and everybody else's, among whom, in gallant Italian fashion, he did not distinguish.  My grandfather, thus thrust into the role, which he could not sustain, of Honorary Pater Familias, would grow silent and withdraw, baffled and unnoticed, while Uncle Ray and the kids took over the living room.  Even though this involved a good deal more tumult and shouting than I was used to, I would join in with a glad heart for two reasons:  (1) I quite as cordially detested my grandfather as he did me, and I was quick to see the point of Uncle Ray's manoeuvre and to approve of it; and (2) I liked and respected my Uncle Ray (We had talked, and he knew that I at least knew the names of Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Leonardo, Donatello, Palestrina), and I was willing, up to a point, to go along with anything he thought of for us kids to do.  That point, however, was reached with a television broadcast of Pagliacci.  Ignoring the stifled muttering and faintly accusatory retreating shuffle of Grandfather Noziere, Uncle Ray called all the children into the living room one afternoon--even those that had been playing outside--to watch and listen to a filmed version on television of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.  It was a case of High Culture (Grand Opera) for Kids, which Uncle Ray's bedrock Italian Catholic Humanism and sense of Paternal Obligation required absolutely that his kids (and any other kids who happened to be in the vicinity) Be Exposed To.  He talked all the way through it, explaining the story and action to our various age levels, and giving a most impressive living translation of everything that was said or sung; no question but that we all, according to our lights, understood it.  For my part, though it was my first experience of operatic verismo, I perfectly understood it--and loathed it, and was appalled and horrified by it:  Sordid, hysterical people doing sordid, criminal things to music that perfectly matched their utterly debased characters.  Did every note have to be scooped?  Was there no one among them who could hit a note dead-on?  And what vulgar tunes!  I waited, frozen with disgust, till I was sure that it had run its course, then I thanked Uncle Ray for his translation of it for us, and told him in a few, bitter words what I thought of Pagliacci and, though I didn't know that's what it was, operatic verismo.  We were never again friends.

Bush Vetoes Bill Banning Torture

Did you think he wouldn't?  Of course, being a metaphorist after George Lakoff's heart (in a sense), he said that "Waterboarding," especially, is a "tool" (or perhaps he said "technique") that the CIA, particularly, must sometimes "employ" (or "practise").  The real question (la grant question, as Francois Villon might have said) is why he bothered to say even that.  The answer, I think, is that you're not really running a terrorist state unless you let the world know--at least a little bit--that that's what you're running; in a word: advertising.  Nice people don't know (don't want to know) about these things, but a necessary and effective part of the Torturer's Art is the preliminary Display of the Instruments of Torture.  It helps too (as well as, ahem, gratifies) if you have a nice selection of pictures of current or previous victims of your work--such as the Nazis always had, such as School of the Americas graduates send to the families of their victims, such as those from Abu Ghraib.  

On a more serious note, Italy's Court of Cassation has recently ruled that Italian women have the right to lie to the police about their extra-marital love-life, if the truth would "harm their reputations among friends and family."  Very sensible. The same august body has in the past ruled that a pat on a woman's ass does not constitute sexual assault "if it is brief and spontaneous," and that a woman wearing tight jeans cannot, properly, be said to be the victim of forcible, in-the-nooky rape, "because her cooperation is required in getting her jeans down or off of her."  A young woman who protested that she had, despite the careful reasoning of the Court, been raped on a lonely road by her driving instructor, got the last judgement reversed. But grave doubts remain as to how he did it:  Did he beat her or threaten her with violence?  Was the car parked?  How big was the car?  Were they in the car? or in the road outside the car? or beside the road outside the car?  When he was unfastening and pulling down her jeans (and she was not cooperating), was he using one hand or two?  How had he secured her so that, without her cooperation, he could unfasten, pull down, and/or remove her jeans?  Did he tie her up?  Hold her down with one hand, while with the other hand he unfastened, pulled down and/or removed her jeans? Were they, in any sense, embracing?  Had they been embracing?  At what point did he penetrate her?  In what position?  When did he bring out his penis?  Was it erect the whole time?  Did he simply unzip his pants, and bring it out through the fly?  Or did he take down or remove his pants?   Was he wearing underwear?  Was he wearing jeans? Were they tight?  I, for one, think the Court's original judgement well founded.   

  

Spain since Franco not so much the Thrall of the CIA

  So many of the things our Puppet Masters do are so outrageous, so blatantly in no one's interest but theirs, that when their horrible little farces come unraveled, as Spain did when their puppet-creature Franco died, they seem to lose their grip, and not to know quite what to make of loose cannons like Juan Carlos and his screwball king-in-parliament democracy and his nut-case anti-fascist (in Catholic Spain!) prime minister Zapatero.  They do their best (or worst--their good being evil) naturally.  As, for example, when the Basque separatists, ETA, bombed the trains in Madrid four years ago, they quickly induced their CIA-Muslim thralls (the same ones that, for a notorious other example, with the Bush government's complicity and connivance, did 9/11) to take the fall for it. For the Spanish government this had the irresistible attraction of neutralizing the effect of Basque terrorism by simply denying that that's what it was--and who knows what other threats and cajolery the CIA employed to foist this particular subversion of justice on the Spanish judiciary?  In any case, it has, sort of, worked; but not like in the good (bad) old days under Franco, when anybody who dared question an official government position would have been tortured to death. Nowadays, the "rumor" that it was, after all, ETA  that bombed the trains has a nasty way of transpiring, no matter what the government says.  And now, in the recent heated debate between the Conservative candidate and the Socialist prime minister currently in power, another tiny felure lente et sure:  The Conservative said, "The economy has slowed in the four years of your government."  And Zapatero replied, "But, of course, that's not the fault of our government.  The economic slowdown is due to the unwarranted interference and manipulation of the government of the United States of America." 

Still Oozing Out of Kenya

The news Monday was that Giuseppe di Stefano, "brilliant but erratic," tenor extraordinary, said to have been Callas's favorite partner both musically and (for what it's worth--It's in the Opera News) "romantically," succumbed, finally, in his villa outside milan, to the wounds he'd received in November, 2004 from a mysterious attack by unknown assailants in his villa in Kenya.   That, of course, led to a lot of googling in several directions. 

In the first place, regarding those mysterious attacks:  The Mungiki, Kikuyus out of power, claiming, probably with reason, descendance from the Mau Mau of the 1950's--they're all over the map in modern Kenya, persecuting and being persecuted.  Among the amusing things they do is murder and mutilate (or perhaps it's mutilate and murder) male children, whose genitals and "other parts" (presumably the livers and hearts) are never recovered, "owing, probably, to their having been utilized (European reporter's word) in [mysterious] initiation rites."  If you're a woman they'll "cut" (their word) you, i.e., circumcise, and if they have the time infibulate, you. Of course, being a tribal fraternity, they collect dues, most significantly by "manning" (their word) public toilets and demanding money at a time when it is most difficult to refuse them.  No one has exactly mentioned their practising cannibalism, as such; it takes, however, but little imagination to suppose that cannibalism (ritual, not subsistence) accounts for a good deal of the vanishing of those murdered male children's body parts.  So, perhaps Signore di Stefano, when he woke up from his coma in his villa outside Milan, months after the mysterious attack in his villa in Kenya--weighing one thing against another--counted himself lucky.  He must have known that he, or what was left of him, still had a few years to live.  

Anyway, that thought led me, via google, to a YouTube recording of di Stefano singing 'Vesti la Giubba.'   Which, of course, I did not listen to--It'll be a cold day in Hell when I'll listen to 'Vesti la Giubba'--but it set me wondering:  If Giuseppe di Stefano (whom proudly I confess never before to have heard of), why not Cesare Siepi?  And lo! There's a lot of Cesare Siepi on YouTube.  Beginning with an excruciating performance of 'Some Enchanted Evening'--for sheer horror right up there with Tebaldi's 'Eef ah-ee loaved you'--hearing that angelic voice, that seraphic musicality and intelligence parroting, with too-too perfect diction, the unintentionally dumb-ass banality of Oscar and Hammerstein, was like watching Lawrence Olivier do straight porn.  But, cutting that short, there was a God's Plenty of Siepi's Mozart, including the best version, maybe, that I ever heard of 'Aprite un po' gli occhi.'  The 'maybe' is because, just possibly, I prefer Thomas Hampsen's version; the reason being that Hampsen's Figaro, warm and beautiful and manly as he is, is not so fine-grained as Siepi's, and not so implausibly aristocratic--back to outclassing your material.  

And then, a final surprise, I found no death date for Cesare Siepi, born in Milan in 1923.  He must, therefore, still be alive.  Magari!  If so, and I can think of anything pleasant enough, respectful enough, interesting enough, to say to him, I'll have to write him a fan letter.  I figure I owe him. 

 

Resemblance

What do Henry Miller, James Joyce, Earnest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Andrea Dworkin, the comte de Sade, the operas of Alban Berg, John Stoltenberg, William Burroughs, Erica Jong (I think), and George W. bush all have in common?  The quality of nastiness, and in most of them an obsession with the fact--and the stink--of shit.  Surprisingly many of them, says Dan Savage of the surprisingly many who write in to tell him about it, are coprophages, and they all think it's cute.  Check.  Actually, there is some other nastiness about Lulu and Wozzeck, but I think it's more of gratuitous violence, or child-murder, or some such thing--a difference, I might say, without a distinktion.