Reading, Watching....

My last batch of library books are all due back tomorrow, and, for a wonder, I've read them all straight through, even the Oxford Anthology of Latin Literature, and I'm ready to return them on time, without incurring any fines.  

I may have been, perhaps, a little harsh on poor maladif Edmund White (calling him an Inconsequential Faggot) who, after all, did his best to create Serious Gay Fiction, and who, perhaps, could not have done so without (living a life that necessarily entailed) contracting HIV.  On the other hand, I may just have done him the severe justice he deserves.  Personally, I dislike all of White's fiction, finding it, though gay, insipid and characterless, devoid of real passion or depth; and, while not precisely noticeably effeminate, still lacking in any understanding or appreciation of essential, innate masculinity, which, like a silly-ass neo-Marxist Feminist Social Constructionist, he seems paradoxically both to resent and to disbelieve in.  In his dispute with Gore Vidal (gratuitously sentimentalizing Vidal's relationship with Timothy McVeigh), White utterly discredited himself, as he did inversely in his idolization of the vicious and utterly negligible (albeit popularly much esteemed) Michel Foucault, and comes very close to approving of Foucault's having deliberately spread the contagion of HIV in the last two or three years of his life, once he knew himself to be infected with it; much, I fear, as White himself may have done.

Meanwhile distracting me, but seldom entertaining me, I've gone disconsolately through the latest offerings on Netflix, finding only one new movie of surprisingly engrossing depth and interest: El Niño.  So today I've re-watched Le Fils de l'Epicier, and damned if it wasn't even better than I remembered it.

But seriously

What I don't understand is why anyone really ever would believe in the silly nonsense/superstition of Christianity.  One has only to Google "What are the best arguments for Christianity?" to see that there  simply aren't any good arguments for it--none that would persuade a tolerably scientifically literate twelve-year-old.  The "Uniqueness of Jesus," for example, is bald-faced, childish twaddle. And it gets worse.  The "evidence" of New Testament Prophecies is so plainly, cynically fraudulent that it not only does not persuade, it must revolt and offend a sincere and honest seeker after truth.  

My Mother's Mother's Father, Who Had Been A Rich Virginia Planter Before He Fled (In What Must Have Been "Una Grande y Felicísima Armada" of a Wagon Train) From the Civil War then Convulsing the Southeastern United States, Diametrically Across the Continent, to Set Up Farming and Housekeeping in the Washington Territory,

Brought with him many of the highly civilized Customs, Usages and Material Appurtenances of the Daily Life of Old Virginie, including books, musical instruments, and household furniture. Life as he had known it in the Old South flowed on uninterrupted, and but little changed, in the austere vastness of the Western Frontier, where the prodigality of his and the woman whom he publicly  called "Mrs. Moore's" hospitality, and their infinitely obliging good manners, won them the universal respect and esteem of  their fellow settlers.  The Moores' week-long dancing parties were the sensation of the Territory--and might have consoled Margaret Mitchell, had she got to hear of them, for the loss of those deliciously protracted Barbecues at Twelve Oaks, which she supposed irrevocably 'Gone With the Wind.'

And yet.  Great-Gandpa Moore was not exactly a successful farmer in the virginal Northwest.  At least not at first.  His attempts at flax-farming and viticulture of the first years went quickly bust, and it wasn't till it dawned on him that the precipitation, which he'd judged meagre by Virginia standards, was yearly constant, without periods of drought, and entirely adequate for dry-land wheat-farming, that his fortunes began to improve.

All this I know from the living testimony of Ellen and Moses's youngest (of six) daughter(s), my grandmother, Alice Effie Moore, as she held me in her lap and recalled those glorious years in her life before she married my grandfather, when she had been "but a little bit of a thing, and oh so light on  my feet," dancing Reels and Schottishes and Waltzes and Quadrilles.

Only one thing, maybe, clouded her recollection of those carefree times--Her father, the genteel, the kindly and exquisitely hospitable southern gentleman, was, at least sometimes, a Vigilante, who, with his law-abiding neighbors, hunted down horse-thieves and hanged them.  And she remembered her mother asking, "But why, Moses?"  And her father answering, "Because someone has to do it, Ellen."

Reading, Reading...and Binge-Watching Netflix

Item)  Edmund White's silly, shallow, snobbish, ill-written memoir about his life and loves in France:  Easy to see why Gore Vidal so detested this inconsequential faggot and his inconsequential work.

Item)  A late (2013) collection of (humoristic? aphoristic?) essays entitled Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris:  The Turn to the Right, taken first (that I know of) with Sedaris' breath-takingly racist but still funny essay on the nastiness of Chinese cuisine (reminiscent of Prince Philip's "If it has four legs and is not a chair, etc.,"), has become a lemming-like swan-dive into the icy, black, poisonous fjord of grimly contentious bigotry.  Is this a White Southern thing?

Item)  Fred Kaplan's methodical, detailed biography of Gore Vidal, full of priceless details and informative analysis, including the astonishingly veracious judgement of Judith Calvino:  "GV had no unconscious...."

And binge-watching on Netflix:

1) Sense8: Adorable (watched it twice in five days).

2) Daredevil: Not implausible.  C'est à dire, if I found myself living (say, because I were born there, and were, sort of, cursed to be there) 24/7, 365/52--immersed, up to the eyes, in crime-infested, corruption-infused, all Jews and Vulgar Minorities NYC--I would think it only natural to be a blind, pro-bono lawyer/defense attorney by day, and by night a super-hero fighting crime and injustice.  It'd be maybe the only way I could respect myself.

3) Royal Pains:  Awash with ugly, self-conscious (and soo not cute) Jewishness (and far, far too many semi-naked women). Jewishness I think is what it is: Intrusive and obtrusive vulgarity, a harping on family relationships (especially the father and the younger brother, both of whose characters are odious), a jaw-droppingly shameless, bare-faced ethos of advancement through exploitation of social contacts, the occasional unwarrantedly insistent yiddicism ("yenta mouth"). Whatever it is, it makes my flesh crawl.  How I know that it's Jewishness, however,  is even to myself a Dark Mystery unillumined by my reading (I have never read Portnoy's Complaint, nor would I, ever) or prior life-experience; but it (my knowing) seems to imply that I am, despite myself--and despite my conscious dissociation from my ancestral Puritan Origins--endowed with a Mayflower Madame's instinctually Jew-loathing WASP sensibilities.

"Sexual Sadism"?

I'm reading about JFK's sexual exploits--there's a flood of information about it lately--Our disapproving, nay pained, young authoress was describing how JFK not only liked lots of sex with a lot of different (but always female) bimbos, but he would also get blow-jobs from these, and then watch while they gave blow-jobs to his fellow male orgiasts (which was as close as he ever got, apparently, to having gay sex):  This our young Caitlyn calls "Sexual Sadism."  A very popular, much-used term these days among heterosexual women, and absolutely incomprehensible to me--until, with a bit of googling, I discovered that, besides Pain, what Sexual Sadists are supposed to inflict on their Victims/Objects is Humiliation.  And that, Humiliated, with connotations of being Used and Dominated, is what Miss Caitlyn, or any other right-thinking young women would feel if she were made (coerced by your ineffable male dominance) to fellate a buddy of yours while you watch.  I'm sooooo glad I'm gay and don't have to think about that--because what she means is that:  She imagines (i.e., she believes with the utter conviction of overmastering delusion) that being ritually humiliated--and she can't believe that "being forced" to give somebody a blow-job while his buddy watches is anything other than the most abject humiliation--is mental torture which hurts her soul (or psyche) in some (real but unspecifiable) way equivalent to what it would be to have a few square inches of her skin pealed back and flaming ethanol dropped on the bleeding wound:  Sexual Sadism.  I, of course, give not a tinker's damn what the Caitlyns of this world believe, or wish to believe--but for the fact that they project their lunacies on the rest of the world, and refuse to disbelieve that men, and boys,  do not share their preposterous views, and so they do much, grievous harm.

I love the word "Dipshit"--as extensively defined in our precious Urban Dictionary

But since nobody seems to know where it comes from, I offer the following:

A Dipshit is one who, when measuring the depth of a certain quantity of shit, holds the measuring stick by the wrong end.

Incarceration, Putting People in Jail, Is the Stupidest, Least Effective, Cruelest, Most Expensive and Utterly Dipshit-Insane Form of Retributive Criminal Justice in the Goddamned World--Just THINK about it for Christ's Sakes for Half a Minute!

Anybody who is in prison, for whatever "reason,"  has a right to escape from it.

Congratulations!

Our hearts go out to these daring and intrepid hardened criminals, David Sweat and Richard Matt, for their successful escape yesterday from the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York.  Bravo!  Would that all their fellow prisoners had escaped with them!--especially those qualified as Cop Killers.  And here's hoping now for a long and violent life on the lam.  Well done, guys!

Side-by-side Reading the past fortnight, The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, along with Moses Hadas' History of Greek Literature

I've uncovered a tiny little smidge of Ancient Dirt:  Julius Caesar probably did, on at least one occasion, have sex with Catullus. Well, what we know is that Catullus, still on the fair side of thirty, said some pretty nasty shit about Caesar, who let his indignation be known, causing Catullus to retract it and say he was sorry; which hearing, Caesar, being in the neighbourhood, invited the still young poet to dinner.  "Had sex?"  Well, if this could be defined as "gave blowjob" (irrumatus est)--maybe.

Okay, Peyote

It just so happened that that endless summer of my twenty-first year I ate a lot of peyote.  It just happened to be there--several shelffulls in the greenhouse attached to Toni Pugh's rooming house, of pots of--Lophophora Williamsii, that actually belonged to Hugh T., that Toni was sort of keeping for him, but which he had given her leave to pass on to whomsoever might want to try it.  So I did, over the summer, eat about a half dozen good-sized pots of peyote.  It was pleasant, beatific well yes--but the only really extraordinary or notably educative thing that happened to me under its influence was that I found that, when really stoned on Peyote, I could improvise three part canzone in the style of Frescobaldi on the piano with great facility.  Which only Patrick, qui cor meum semper partiebatur, really quite understood the miraculousness of--while all my other friends  at the time thought that I must just be playing stuff from memory.  Which was not unlike, though exactly the reverse experience, of déja vu all over again, of, some five years ago, before the present date, when it came my turn to be dummy at bridge, playing through all the Handel suites on the the grand piano at the Central Union Church, which the ancient ladies, who were my bridge partners, and didn't notice me sight-reading, just assumed I was making up on the spot.

In any case, yes, I ate a lot of peyote in the summer of 1964, and I enjoyed it, and found that it did open a certain channel into the consciousness of 3-part polyphony--but, truthfully, I didn't learn a great deal from it, and honestly there wasn't a lot in the experience to learn from.  But I was scrupulous in regarding it as a sacrament  for spiritual growth, and, come September, I faithfully replaced all the peyote that I had consumed:  It being still legal then, and sold openly in commercial greenhouses, I bought several flats of it from what was then Nansen's Greenhouse and Garden Supply--about twice the quantity that I had consumed--and cooked it all up into a paste, which I dried in the oven, and pulverized it in a mortar  with a pestle, and put the powder in gel caps, about three quarters of a gallon of them, which I then put in a large plastic jar with a screw-on lid and placed it in the back of the cupboard over the sink in Toni Pugh's kitchen.  And in all that exquisite conscientiousness and bee-like scrupulosity, and plain hard work, you can, if you are alive to such things, detect the power and scope of peyote  consciousness, such as it is.  

I accept that Bruce Jenner is a Conservative Republican

Knowing (in a sort of general way--the way one knows that someone in the room has farted) that the renowned Wheaties-eater had acquired some sort of family connexion with the god-awful tribe of female Kardashians: "Ah," I said to myself, "He must be a Conservative Republican."  And it turns out that he has only recently gone on national television and told the world that, indeed, that's what he is--and everyone's surprised. But I'm not in the least surprised: Anybody who has that much to do, voluntarily, with ghastly, acephalic, fat-assed female Kardashians would just have to be a Conservative Republican: Q.E.D.  Or, to put it another way, it stands to reason. But I don't for a minute believe that Brucie is a woman, just because he wants very much to be one, and says he is one, and that his name is now Caitlyn: Of course, being a Conservative Republican, and hanging out with steatopygic Kardashian females, he would very much want to be a woman, and would be so delusional as to believe that he is a woman.  No surprises there.  But of fucking course he is not a woman.  Because there is no such fucking thing as transgender.  At all.  Really.