I should have listened to myself

I am suffering quite an Embarras de Maupin.  I have now--I think it's five or six--several well-worn (he's very popular) volumes of Armistead Maupin's Tales and More Tales of the City checked out from the Hawaii State Library--some from as far away as Hilo on the Big Island--and I find I cannot bear to read them:  Maupin is--as I said before (see blog, Being a Snob, 3/28/08) that I somehow knew he was--effeminate, in the bad old sense of being unduly concerned, overly, rather nastily, preoccupied with women, and a palpable closet heterosexist to boot; his few gay characters (painfully, to a discerning sensibility, denatured) are sort of thrown in as window-dressing, or couleur locale. This in what purports to be a sort of portrait of San Francisco in the 1970's and 80's!  In short, Maupin is another pussy-man--gawd 'elp us all.  And his stories go way more into the characters and physical natures of women than I will ever willingly go--unless they are fabulous monsters of evil like Racine's heroines, or tragic examples of the anatomist's art like the heroines of Flaubert, Zola, du Maupassant, or Gide; or, alternatively, like the purely human constructions of Mme. de la Fayette, Henry James, Goldoni, or E.M. Forster.  Otherwise, puh-leeze:  I do not wish to learn that women defecate, or that, if they're fat, they have to beat the boys off with a stick (and what a stupid, insulting, heterosexist, masturbatory fantasy that is!--Pussy-men are so vile, so unconsciously demeaning, in the stereotypifying that they don't even realize they're permitting themselves!).   How right I have been, all along, "with the jaw-set and the eyes-glazed of one ignoring a fart-joke or a fart," to have "turned away from all reading and discussion of Maupin and his impious, presumptuous profanation."

That said, I have been enjoying a veritable smorgasbord of Frederick Crews:  what a dainty feast is Postmodern Pooh!  What an exquisite thrill to have Erik Erikson and Earnest Hemingway, among others in the crtiticism, so neatly, almost gently, eviscerated!  And in the latter case to have the judgement of Gertrude Stein confirmed, with all its sly, triumphant mockery!  Both Gertrude and Alice really, really despised (and enjoyed despising) the young Mr. Hemingway.  As do I.

And, of course, it's always a pleasure to be reading the memoirs of the Princess Der Ling.  The mingled squalor and luxury, refinement and savagery, of the last years of the Imperial Chinese Court are endlessly fascinating.  One or two of the princess's books I read long ago, serendipitously, as a fifteen-year-old.  Fifty years ago I found her memoirs more nostalgically enchanting than I do now, because I have grown over the years less tolerant of cruelty and quicker to detect it: Princess Der Ling, for all her magnificence, her keen appreciation of beauty, and the extreme subtlety of her sensibilities, was (I now perceive) not a kind person; and her first impulse at witnessing someone else's misfortune (especially if they were a eunuch) was to laugh heartily. She's perfectly up-front in fact--thinking no evil--about her cold and vicious class-hatred of eunuchs.  She seems to have thought of them as a sort of rat-people.  Of course that's what everybody thought.  I remember a blog which I can't find right offhand, back in the late spring of 2006, in which I copied out the Empress's misgivings about having an Englishwoman hanging about in Her Court:  "Suppose she were to see a eunuch being punished.  She would think that we were barbarians...."