In the summer of my 13th year, the Nozière "family"--all, strictly speaking, genetically related to one another, but in fact, in the way that American "families" so often are, a totally fragmented, heterogeneous collection of utterly disparate individuals--along with our four cats, moved from middle-class rural Eastern Washington to rural-suburban Western Oregon, just south of Portland, and I, a couple of weeks before my 14th birthday entered high school as a freshman.

In most ways, our new situation quite suited me.  Our new house--adequate in size for the three or four of us (Father being gone, most of the time, on the road, as a traveling farm equipment salesman), and all our cats, who mostly lived in it--was a then fairly recent construction, a plain exercise in the Pacific Northwest Wood-framed Modernist Style, which had been built as a foreman's house, situated, with garage and yard, just inside a thirty acre strawberry field, on a berry and grass-seed farm twenty miles or so south of Oregon City.  The only neighbors were Richard and Gladys Polehn, a sixties-something couple, whom I grew to know and love (there's no other word for it) over the next two or three years, technically our landlords, who lived in the lovely old, Queen Anne style "main house," up the hill and up the lane from us.  We became patrons of both the Clackamas (Oregon City) and the Multnomah (Portland) County Libraries, and I was enrolled as a freshman in the high school at Estacada--a forty or fifty minute bus ride in the morning and in afternoon--the largest institution, with more than 500 students in four grades, that I had ever attended. 

I was petrified.  Many were the ways that led down to exposure of my Dark and Horrible Secret (being gay), with attendant, certain, eternal, Disgrace and Death.  Almost as threatening were the countless indignities, disgusts and dismaying absurdities that dogged and bedeviled me simply for being one among many high school students, clamoring like the Progeny of Sin for my full compliance, allegiance and enthusiastic participation:  (1) popular music, then at its absolute cultural nadir; (2) athletic activities and team sports; (3) social activities; (4) social activities involving girls.  Reading, from the moment I got on the bus till the moment I got off, and never, that I recall, speaking to anyone, got me through those dangerous forty to fifty minutes on the bus, before and after school; while sitting next to a window in the course of the bus's several crossings of the Clackamas River,  which flows through the center of Estacada, and whose beauty I worshipped with a mad, druidic devotion, did much to alleviate the black, toxic mass which lay on my soul in the presence of my school-mates.

But one final thing, a couple of days before school started, I withdrew the money that had been lying in the bank since the sale of my 4-H steer the year before, and bought a pretty much state of the art stereophonic record player (for the year 1956), which I placed on the dresser next to my bed with the speakers right against my left ear.  And, thanks to records (vinyl, as all records were then) lent me by the Multnomah and Clackamas County Libraries--of the music of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky--I survived, even flourished, like a watered plant.  I had a brother, two years younger (what was our mother thinking of in putting us into the same room together?), who, from time to time, because he was there, I would try to get him to appreciate this or that pretty, accessible piece of music--I tried really hard, that I recall, with Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A Major.  But I had always to give it up, and usually wound up saying something like, "Not to hurt your feelings or anything, but part of your soul seems to be missing, or dead."

I didn't learn of my paternal grandfather's (and grandmother's) savage, relentless, bestial, physical cruelty to my father till I was a grown man--His sisters, my aunts, eventually told me about it--

But I always detested the son of a bitch nonetheless, from my earliest childhood, almost as much as if it had been I who had endured his sadistic abuse; and I was as cold to my grandmother as if it had been me whom she betrayed to him, and delivered into his hands.  I see now, looking at records from the cemetery where he is buried, that I was just ten years old when he died at the age of 82, but I recall the taunting sarcasm with which I refused to attend his funeral, and was allowed, without comment, not to. When the mourners came back from the funeral in the late afternoon, I greeted the few cousins of approximately my age with a mocking, deliberately disrespectful smirk and a smart-ass question, as if they'd come from a sporting event, "So how was the funeral?"  They seemed visibly shaken, but not sad or grief-stricken. My cousin Raymond said, "Grandma cried and yelled and tried to crawl into the coffin with him."  Passing adults shushed us at that point, but I could tell by looking at Raymond that the horror of the indecent spectacle that our grandmother had made of herself still gripped him; he looked as if he might puke, or faint. We stared at one another aghast till the adult presence had passed, then in a voice half a whisper, he added, "Uncle Marvin had to pull her out."

It was my father's cousin Harold, the same as had given me the full set of the Book of Knowledge when I was ten years old, who,

When I was twelve years old, made sure that I was enrolled in 4-H Future Farmers of America, and drove with me among his herd of hereford cattle to select a steer for me to raise and fatten for show and sale the following spring.  Raising a steer was a lot of work, involving an unthinkable amount of bovine excrement, but I pursued it with grim determination, becoming, as I now reflect on it, both competent and confident in precisely the way that such programs are intended to prepare the Children of Privilege for the self-reliant management of their own affairs.  When the animal I had cared for so assiduously for the better part of a year was driven off, and the judges of the 4-H Roundup and Sale, handed me the check for his market value, I was exhausted, dry-eyed, and ready to begin the next phase of my life.  I deposited the check in the bank and waited.  

At the movies...

I've been watching, thanks to Hulu and Netflix, rather a broad spectrum of cinematic art.  At one bright, funny end are the gorgeous comedies of Pedro Almodóvar; at the other (fading to black) antipodes are such inadvertently barbaric, self-conscious  ideologically gay dreck as I watched last night, called Eating Out.  And in between have come a couple of rather wonderful Japanese films, Footloose in Tokyo and Like Father, like Son (both charming; the latter exquisite in many, many ways, not the least of which is its perfect adaption of the "background" music to the mood and temper of the action, with the precise, quiet placement of the slowest of the Goldberg variations just before the dénouement, to describe the breaking of a child's heart, which is absolutely shattering).  Not to mention a workmanlike French evocation of Le Misanthrope de nos jours, Alceste à Bicyclette, stamped all over with traditional, oh-so-French adoration of la Culture, but convincingly made central and relevant to the Modern Age--by the same fellows who did Les Femmes du 6ième Étage which I liked so much a few years ago--but of course one can scarcely get enough of Le Misanthrope just as Molière wrote it, recited, and re-recited, to show the different, complex layers of meaning and characterization beneath the dazzling polish of those glorious alexandrines.  Frankly, it makes the tormented heart of a woman, of which we get so everlastingly much in Racine, seem somewhat tedious--even slow-witted (dull?)--in comparison.  I said as much to my favorite prof at UO, Alexandre, a profound Racinien, anent Bérénice, and he snapped back, like un coup de fouet, "Vous avez un coeur de pierre!"  

But getting back to our sheep, the awful, terribly sincere, vulgar and tedious little movie, Eating Out, contains the most astonishing revelation of the vast cultural disconnect (between themselves and Western Civilization) that young, half-educated barbarity have arrived at  in its by-the-way depiction of "Classical Music":  Four misshapen, leering freaks seated at two pianos, who play, together, from printed music, at breakneck speed, a kind of Souza march with polka elements--calliope, hurdy-gurdy music.  That, I do believe, is what they see and what they hear in the music they call "Classical." 

I must confess, I have no idea what the Isis is that the Government claims is an Offshoot of al-Qaida, and that it is currently bombing in Syria--

I strongly suspect, however, that it's nothing at all--at least, nothing like what our infinitely iniquitous and infernally mendacious government says it is--in order that it may have an excuse to bomb something.  The only reason I am not giving us peremptory orders to get us out of whatever the hell we're into forthwith, is that I am given to understand that, in opposing Isis--what ever it is or isn't--we have the Kurds at our side, and the possibility of realizing a much-deserved sovereign state of Kurdistan.  And that (as I know from my acquaintance in years past with valiant and honorable Kurds) would be worth bombing for; maybe even fighting for.

(I should say from my experience with one valiant and honorable Kurd):  Omar, who ran a little sundries and concession store across the street from the Basilico San Lorenzo in Perugia, whom I got to know from my stopping in at his store for Cokes during the ferragósto, when everything else was closed, and who told me, when I couldn't place his accent, that he was a  Kurd.  "Ah," I said, "Zoroastrian?"  Which of course was just the right thing to say to him.  He opened up to me like a flower, describing the miseries and calamities visited on his proud and ancient people by everybody else generally, but above all by the accursèd Muslims.  "You so deserve your own homeland!" I said to him, squeezing his hand in a manly fashion. "My Brother!" he said, squeezing back.  I told him how I regretted having to leave (end of term) when we'd just got to know one another, and he said, "Come again on the day you leave."  I promised him that I would.  And when, as promised, I showed up at his shop on  the afternoon of my departure, Omar gave me a bottle of very nice red wine--Valpolicella--and while embracing me in a brotherly fashion, said, "When you drink it, with a friend, think of me, and drink to the Kurds of Kurdistan."   And a couple of weeks later, visiting Phil in Germany, that's just what we did.

The Thing about poor nasty old Joan Rivers, was that she was vulgar--

Vulgar in a specifically American East Coast, unreflectingly heterosexual, pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian, Zionist Jewess kind of way that appalled, at the same time as its utter naked viciousness shocked. Somehow, she reminded me of Françoise de Graffigny, though I think she was smarter than Voltaire's houseguest and had a better sense of humor.  At any rate, I didn't pay much attention to Joan Rivers, even when she called Obama a "faggot" and Michelle a "tranny," because it seemed to me that, like the ewige alte Jüdin Joan was (as in "I Remember Mama") she had hit on something, something very important that nobody else was giving the attention it deserved--and calling it by just slightly the wrong name (as exasperating Jewish mamas are always doing).  Obama may or may not be a homosexual sadist (How many times has he been to Afghanistan?), but the important thing about him--that leaps out and grabs you by the throat and worries you--is that he has no character at all.  He's a creature of the Chicago Mob, with the standard Harvard veneer, with no known tastes except a liking for Dijon mustard on his sandwiches, and no enthusiasms or interests--and, so far as is known, he is equally devoid of aversions, pet peeves or dislikes.  Oh, and he makes chilling little jests sometimes about having people murdered.  Cruel it may be to notice, but the East African inheritance of long-limbed gracility, and a sallow, half-negroid complexion, lends him a distinctly non-human, tongue-dartingly saurian allure. It takes a New York Jewess to see the stereotypical faggotry in that (Joan Rivers meet Midge Decter).  I repeat, what I see in Barrack Obama is nothing, nothing, nothing, right down to the utter hollowness of personal affect: Or, if you will, what I see is a shape-shifting, flesh-eating Lizard from Outer Space:  To me, those are identical quantities.  And Michelle, likewise totally without character, is perfect in her non-entity, whether she be Obama's "beard" or paramour--It is wide of the mark, though rude, and, I grant, amusing, to call her a "tranny."

So, it would have been a fretful, vain, peevish and waspish Sultan indeed (or perhaps an unusually prickly paramour) who'd have had Joan Rivers snuffed.

The Psychology of Gay Men is largely unknown and unexamined, despite male Homosexuality's being the largest single Standard Normal Deviation in the World.

The pall of persecution and odium that male homosexuality, the second-most (if not in fact the first) natural affection of mankind, has lain under since the late fourth century of the Common Era has been lifted in the past couple of decades in Civilized Countries--for no reason that anyone can claim with certainty to have been the cause: Things have simply gotten better.  Gay men are just not persecuted or discriminated against any more.   And it appears that the reason that the psychology of gay men is unknown and unexamined may well be: because there isn't one particularly--except for a common tendency (which is not unknown among straight men) to vomit when the word "vagina" is mentioned.  The psychology of gay men appears to be that of men tout simple.  

What Gay Guys Think About Vaginas.

Poor old Joan Rivers...

As the investigation into what so mysteriously caused her heart to fail during an upper endoscopy draws on, ever more enigmatically, like a wounded snake--and I do but refer to the latest daily news of it:  It was disclosed today that the surgeon-in-charge had caused at least one other unqualified observer to be present during the procedure, in a manner both unusual and illegal.  It is well to bear in mind that the punishments meted out by the Sultan for wounding the Sultan's vanity--say, by calling him a "faggot" and his official paramour a "tranny"--are usually scarcely concealed and are hardly disavowed, since their purpose is to warn as much as to terrify.

Acquiring Taste

As I understand him, Noam Chomsky's basic argument, against the tabula rasa-ist/empirical, gradually pieced-together theory of language acquisition, is that children actually proceed, at a much faster, conceptually synthetic and hyper-logical rate than such a system would allow, actually to speak  and rationalize the core-logical elements of speech.  Which, as was noted by Ancient Greeks, is the same as reason itself.  We lithp in numberth for the numberth come.

So it was for me in the acquisition of critical acumen, otherwise known as taste.  For the Christmas of my seventh year, my "Uncles Delmer and Doc" (presumably my Uncle Delmer's wife Della) sent me, by Santa's infinitely capacious sleigh, a two-volume set of fairy tales:  one, bound in blue, being a heavily redacted (though not, thank heaven, completely bowdlerized) copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales; the other, bound in gold, being a selection of Hans Christian Andersen's already literacized and polished, self-conscious "Children's Tales."  I loved the former, with all its gleeful sadism,  and loathed the latter--particularly execrating the protracted morbidity of "The Snow Queen," the Moral Insanity of which, though I had not then words for, both shocked and disgusted me.  Still does.

Watching Television on my Computer,

The Australian crime-epic Underbelly, in particular, with its amazingly high production values, and its intriguing cast of actors portraying criminals who, in real life, drew the conscious inspiration for their glamorous, glitzy, sex-drenched and blood-soaked lifestyle from the Hollywood movies of the previous decade in which stars like Al Pacino celebrated the glamorous, glitzy and blood-soaked (but perhaps less sex-drenched) lives of American criminals--Art imitating Life imitating Art imitating Life.  And somehow this is plainly evident as you watch it. 

Also plainly evident as you watch is the citizens of Australia's (both the grindingly self-righteous, and at the same time pervasively corrupt middle class and the violently vile lower class--and there aren't any other classes, apparently) seemingly permanent state of psychosocial and political retardation--no more so than that of, say, the citizens of the United Nations, or of the countries of the NATO alliance, or of China, or of the Kingdom of Thailand, but, shockingly, quite as much so as that of (my fellow Americans) the still true-believing thralls of the official corporate entity (USA) of the Evil Empire:   Australia's cops, and far, far too many of Australia's middle class actually believe in the goodness and righteousness--or at least the moral necessity--of the Drug War.  I keep reminding myself as I watch that these are, after all, the same relatively few people who have made so many stunningly excellent movies and delicious wines, and from whose various loins have sprung Nellie Melba and Julian Assange, to name but two.  Of Dame Nellie I have just read an amusing and possibly pertinent anecdote--But first of all, I must say that, some 48 years ago (amazing!), listening to f.m. radio in Seattle one fine April morning, I chanced to hear a then ancient recording of Nellie Melba singing (I think it was) the Jewel Song from Faust, and it was fucking ravishing.  You have to know that to make sense of this:  Melba hated Sir Thomas Beecham, who was then Schauspieldirektor at Covent Garden, and said of him, simply, "I dislike Beecham and his methods."  Beecham, for his part, opined that, "while [Melba] had nearly all the attributes inseparable from great artistry...she was wanting in genuine spiritual refinement."  This of the original Mimi!

But--How strange we were then!--Melba had to argue strongly (?) for the production of La Bohème at Covent Garden, "in the face of distaste expressed by the management at this 'new and plebeian opera,'" which was overcome by public enthusiasm for the piece which was bolstered in 1902 when Enrico Caruso joined Melba in the first of many Covent Garden performances together.

Yet the aspersion so sniffily cast by his baronetship, liver-pill heir Sir Thomas Beecham, lingers and still attaches to the Titanic Dame Melba, "like a scent of dung beneath the fingernails," and maybe explains why she never seriously attempted to sing Mozart (with Beecham, beyond question, the greatest exponent of Mozart of his generation, right there to tell her how she was doing it wrong). "Genuine spiritual refinement" is probably just what that astonishingly beautiful person and angelic voice were lacking--and it would have been noticed, the instant that, say, as the Condessa, she had stepped forth to sing "Porgi Amor."  Perhaps, maybe. And maybe it had something to do with her being Australian:  Something about how when you start out being a penal colony, a snake-infested human refuse pit, you never really rise above it, never lose the stink of it, nor the inveterate vulgarity.  Ever.  Acid-tongued, lynx-eyed, perfectly phrased and articulated Mozartean Sir Thomas might just have been snob enough to think so.  And I think that means he was a heartless poofter.

Beethoven String Quartet Op.59 No.1 "Razumovsky"

More of me, Anatole, asking myself if having a sublime philosophy of sex makes sex hot, or whether it's the unguessable, random Divine Accidence of sex--

Thus musing, I began reading a recent contribution to the Nifty Erotic Stories website, a story about a middle-aged man who is a friend-with-benefits of another middle-aged man, both of whom have college-age sons who also have sex together--and the question is with them also ¿Are they lovers, or merely friends-with-benefits.  And I am thinking, as I read, what a lot of interesting questions this story has already raised;  maybe a whole new Province of Male Love mapped out in our Gay Humanist's Carte du Tendre...And then,

"I'd worked out that they (the sons) operated a loose rota of which of them would get to mount the other....I sniffed at the air, hoping to to be able to identify from the palpable anal odor that was wafting in from the corridor, which of their bums was being penetrated...."

The narrative does continue, I think, as coprophiles are wont (like the dogs they nearest resemble, rushing with ever more fervid delight [for shit excites them] from turd to turd) always to go on, asked or unasked...but I, horror-stricken and appalled, of course,  had long since stopped reading. 

It appears that there really is some necessity of separating coprophiles, shit-eaters and fart-smellers from the rest of us.  Else, like bishops in the Church of England, or girls  in gay male pornography, or dogs in cemeteries, they will (if only for mere despite at being excluded) but the more determinedly wriggle, creep, climb and intrude in among us, and loudly and insistently claim unthinkable and entirely inadmissible equality with us who despise and reject them.  Yea, I have known one coprophage  (since dead of AIDS--and no loss) who, though sensible of my hatred for him, seated himself across from me at table in an upscale restaurant in San Francisco, and who proceeded in an over-familiar way to spear forkfuls of my salad from my salad plate--till I stabbed him in the back of the hand with my salad fork, causing him to scream piteously, and making rather a scene, such as are seldom indeed beheld in upscale restaurants in San Francisco.

I allow that there is a certain tacit tension between my life-long, happy and not infrequent indulgence in anal sex--(or that there was such tension, back in the day when I did have sex) both passive and active, and even analingus--and my utter horror at the very idea, much the less the smell, of so much as the former presence of shit.  But not once in the three or four hundred times that I had sex with men did I ever detect so much as a whiff of it, nor so much as think to avoid it--although I did many, many times administer to myself thorough, precautionary enemas, precisely in order not to have to think about it.  The tension exists in the first place, I believe, because the rectum/cloaca ever was, evolutionarily, the first organ of generation, and, with the placement of the prostate gland in the rectum, has retained this function in normal male/male sexual relations of homo sapiens sapiens (as it may, for all I know, in male/male sexual relations of Pan paniscus).  The point is that, as a sex-organ, the cloaca is surprisingly efficient, to a degree self-cleansing (unlike, say, vaginas)--whose prudent use much less often results in the dispersion of sperm in feces than might, at first blush, have been supposed. Et pour vérifier cela vous n'avez que demander à Sieur Chanticleer et à sa Dame Pertelote.

Yesterday, in the late afternoon,

I lay down for a nap that lasted maybe an hour altogether--one of maybe a half-dozen or a dozen such dreams in my whole life (that I remember) of utter transcendent, joy, wit, music, happiness: A many-leveled villa on the Amalfi Coast, a large, loose family of Olympian divinities (as they were on subsequent reflection), adventurers, passers-through, domestics, minor grades of nobility, adolescents, inglesi italianati--wandering from terrace to giardinetto to salotto, chatting, gossiping, laughing--and singing.  Everywhere the plunking of lutes, and a canzonetta that seemed to've caught everybody's fancy--I'd heard it at least twice through before I joined in at the last to sing it along with everyone else, before we all sat down to the dinner laid out on the upper terrace.... 

'Twas but a Fortnight ago that Joan Rivers, now dead, was saying (I heard her) that Obama's a Faggot and Michelle's a Tranny.

The sequence, and the close timing of those events did strike me as suspect--knowing what we know, and surmising what we surmise about  Obama's Kill Lists--but not being a particular fan of Mrs. Rivers, I hadn't thought to enquire further...till just a few minutes ago, thinking no more than, "Well, I just need to be sure," I Googled "Cause of Joan River's Death," and found that it's "unknown...under investigation," and that, indeed, the entire Yorkville Endoscopy Clinic--where Rivers was undergoing minor exploratory throat surgery, when she succumbed to cardiac arrest--is locked down, under guard, and being investigated by the New York Department of Health.  Oh my.  

My dismay is at this first evidence (that I know of) of the Sultan's [my pet designation of Obama] using his absolute, unchallenged prerogative of murdering his subjects, Kill Lists, in order to avenge personal insult against himself and his favorites.  It's the avenging of insults against favorites (familiar to us from Chinese and Turkish history) that, typically, unleash the full horrors of the Terrorist State; although, thinking of vengeance for direct personal insults, there's little that exceeds Caracalla's sack of Thebes and mass murder of Thebans for the crime of having had performed in that city a play denouncing his barbarity and cruelty.  But oh my.  

Is one American in a hundred aware that on August 29th, one week ago, in Dresden, Angela Merkel was confronted with a massive demonstration

of cleanly, well kempt,  but plainly outraged and fed-up German citizens, who shouted and whistled her down, and carried signs which denounced her anti-Russian NATO-toadyism as Lüge! (Lies!) and which demanded Kein Krieg mit Russland! (No War with Russia!)?  One in 200?  500?  Why ever do you suppose there are so few of us?

Pop 'Music'--All 20,000,000 'Songs' (or 40,000,000, or however many there supposedly are) is something

I try to pay no attention to.  I feel that any attention that it claims from me is an invasive, importunate, unwarranted extortion.  I find it, always and invariably, with no exceptions,  gratingly ugly, quite quite stupid, shit-vulgar, and, insofar as it is aware of itself, vile, smart-alecky and nasty. I hate it,  loathe it, despise it, detest it; and, at the same time, I am irritated, appalled, annoyed and disgusted by it.  And I feel--though fully conscious of the craziness of such a feeling--that, through it, the Universe is conspiring to  persecute and afflict me--just me in particular--or others like me, if there are any.  When it obtrudes, when its obscene noise swells up, say, when I'm watching a movie on Netflix, I turn it down, way down--not infrequently watching whole movies in captions with the sound turned off, rather than having to endure even a few snippets of it.

Item (Sir Mix-a-Lot - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia):  Anthony Ray (born August 12, 1963), better known by his stage name Sir Mix-a-Lot is an American MC and producer...Sir Mix-a-Lot is best known for his 1992 album Mack Daddy and its Grammy award winning single "Baby Got Back."

Item ("Baby Got Back" from Wikipedia) "BGB" has remained popular, "even anthemic" since it was released, in 1992.  It was the second best selling song of 1992, with sales of 2,392,000 that year.  In 2008, it was ranked 17 on VH1's (?) Greatest Songs of Hip Hop...The first verse begins with "I like big butts and I cannot lie," and most of the song is about the rapper's attraction to [the] large buttocks [of negresses]....