in the hall of mirrors

Perfect fantasy

The Girl from Rio: an utter fantasy of a movie. London bank clerk fantasizes about the samba and a beautiful girl who appears on all the Carnival videotapes; when his wife goes away with his boss, he steals a fortune, goes to Rio and meets The Girl. A few pathetically simple, mildly amusing plot twists; he briefly returns to London to discover that no one knows he stole the money; and goes back to permanent happiness.

The screenplay is so devastatingly simplistic, the plot twists so obvious and blithe, the whole so frankly lazy, that you can't even call it a bad screenplay – the truth is, it's scarcely any kind of a screenplay at all. The plot twists would only have made sense to someone drinking their third capirinha on a shady balcony on location, everyone around them roaring with happy laughter over a stupid joke: this movie is the product of the point where the writers, and director, say, what the hell, it's good enough, let's just film the damned thing.

The movie is pleasant to see, because of Hugh Laurie's exquisite comic timing, and also because of the cheerfully straightforward charm of the girl who plays The Girl (one of those actresses who doesn't even try to act, but who cares); however, the main attraction is that the whole is so exactly and uninflectedly what you want to have happen – even as the critical part of your mind is stunned by the utter lack of, well, real problems, most of you knows that you simply want to be on that beach with them.

A slightly tangled para-experience for me: a London bank clerk would know where he stood in relation to the movie, indeed anyone caught in the north-to-south (i.e. cold-to-warm, gray-to-sunny, responsible-to-carefree, frankly miserable-to-happy) polarity of the film's world would know just where they stood. But, as a foreigner, identity made in California but living in an even further and more miserable north, whose axes of experience are thus a bit skewed from all this, I can't help but feel that I shouldn't need to have this fantasy. Shouldn't I just be able to, well, go to Rio? And meet a handsome bodybuilder? And live by the beach? I mean – why not, after all – am I not free of the bonds of family, responsible career, stuffy obedience to society's demands?...

I guess it's even more silly than it sounds, if such a thing is possible: caught between someone else's reality – and everybody's fantasy....

Curses

Although I'm supposed to be working this weekend on the papers for a new degree program, and the woman I'm working with wants to know when we'll be finished, I'm having an avoidant day – not disastrous, there's a whole three-day weekend to figure out all this stuff.

I still feel a bit guilty and harried, though. In any case, I have been spending the day reading ghost stories by M. R. James – although it's true that I don't generally like horror stories, and detective fiction doesn't interest me much (it all seems too end-driven and therefore predictable), these stories are wonderful – the great original writer of ghost stories as entertainment, all gracious and old-fashioned in wording, intelligent in detail and imagination, and short (which is good, as I don't enjoy being tortured by the unhappiness or uncertainty of characters, at least not for more than a page or two).

This kind of imaginative world – ghosts, the dead, revenge, curses: I have occasionally, obliquely, wondered if the downward trends of my career and aspects of my personal life result from someone having, once, wished them on me. Although, as I have often admitted here and elsewhere, I can be irritable, severe, and make other people angry – as Susan once politely said: I don't suffer fools gladly – I have only rarely been the direct recipient of rage, malice, anger. There was the realization that the poisonous Amy, who had treated her greedy investment broker husband with such viciousness, had done her best to ruin my relationship with some of my teachers, in the late 1980s (she would certainly be imaginable as a witch, and one that would enjoy cursing people). Then there was that enraged five-page letter from Harvey, a tirade against my being gay, and his hysterical certainty that it was a blatant temptation of his heterosexuality (fortunately we later made friends again; it was so sad when he later died, and under such ridiculous circumstances – hit by a car while jogging, his mother told me – perhaps someone else cursed him).

There have, certainly, been others who decided I wasn't worth their time, or was annoying, or dislikable. But what is the chance that someone, some time, decided I had gotten in their way – or deeply offended them – and put a curse, not perhaps a very large one, on my life? Just the kind of malevolance that demands that things go wrong for someone: just a small if unpleasant spell, but one that is hard to shake, one that makes small and unpleasant things happen, endlessly.

And: how would you make such a thing go away?...

Focus

These two days I am doing a couple of presentations about art and AIDS, around a new production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

Though they are not in themselves difficult, or terribly important, nor do I expect substantial attention or audience involvement, I find myself fussing a lot over them – and not only because that damned cold still has not really gone away. What this suggests, of course, is that I simply don't have enough to do: yes, there's too much boring administration (but the problem with that isn't that it's difficult, it's that I don't care about it); and teaching (doing it is easy – the horrid, and dispiriting, part is chasing after the students when they don't seem to care about it); and of course research, which I mostly avoid.

But since my life here is too narrow ("If only we could go to Moscow!"), these little, easy things get too much focus, too much attention, and generate too much pressure – this is the opposite of that lively, somewhat crazed life one has in metropoli when things are going well, and busily. In such a vacuum, one becomes tiresomely fretful, petty – easily enraged, too; I've sent two scathingly angry e-mails in the past week to people who weren't at all prepared for them. All of this is a product of, not really stress or overwork, but a kind of peculiar 'underwork' – where work, however much of it there may be, seems rather trivial and ineffective. It's very Chekhovian, I suppose – and, although I understand the (kind of counterintuitive) claim that Chekhov writes comedies, I am not finding it all terribly funny.

Perhaps I'm also affected by spending time with the actors, who are all lively Londoners, mostly around the age of thirty (which slightly affects their reading of the play – they cannot quite believe that darkness, malice, and the power of money were quite as awful in the 1980s as they actually were). Actors, of course, always seem to live in mercurial worlds that are larger than life – and we like to think of that as artificial, as unreal (the celebrity, the luvvie, the narcissist). But maybe the truth is that they are right – if you don't see everything you do as immensely meaningful, and tie it to deep feelings, experiences, ideas, aims beyond what one might expect of you, then you probably are wasting what time you have on earth. Which is all too easy to do.

Ah, well: if only – if only I could go to – London?...

Constantinople

[Fragments of an unfinished poem, including two false starts – or perhaps middles]

Lost is lost, no griefs could bring it back.

Blood, blood, those faces, broken walls and burning towers,
Jewels scattered in the alley, a wailing mother,
the bearded merchant skewered,

...

Jeweled women flee down alleys,
A bearded shopkeeper skewered, his shouting slaves, a brave
and foolish boy too young to hold his sword,
two smaller sisters scatter. It made no sense,
served nothing – not much new wealth elsewhere,
not increased power, no trade of happiness,
Was only loss: these buildings, even that bright dome,
Will never show again a perfect flower.

Is lost. Chalices that cannot be refigured,
Tiles finally broken, a crumbled wall
And no one can still see the shape it meant to be
No going back, no return to towers,
If God is their defender then he’s dead.

But when the smoke clears, when the blood is washed
From stones, when men with swords and needles
Have left in search of other plunder,
And survivors find their loves and, wailing,
Consign them to kind earth,
Then another city must be built: not the same,
Not that glory or perfection that happens the first time it is created.
But something: still a beauty, an air, a life:
Time continues, people come to live here,
A new house is built in the shelter of what’s left of the wall.

And in the rubble, searching just for stones, one finds:
A bolt of silk, a broken jar of cinnamon, and see:
A golden chalice. Is found.

[London, 6/19/01- ]

As if

Going back to bed, still fuzzy with a cold that has lasted several days, and which keeps returning, unwelcome – I am imagining my life differently, as I do so often: what if that had happened, what if I could intervene here, what if I had chosen to do this instead, what would have been my ideal vocation, the career that would have worked out beautifully. A favorite game, though admittedly a somewhat desperate and pathetic one.

The extended dreamscape that ensues is strange and unexpected – but perhaps entirely, if cruelly, deserved: unrolling with the apparent narrative clarity of a 1960s film, it is full of the unexplained and incomprehensible – is this some film colony, some coastal resort? Why is this alternate-history version of me, this as-if me, doing all these inexplicable things – driving this bulging 1940s car with two children, lying by a pool chatting with women in lounge chairs? Although the surface seems coherent, nothing quite makes sense – time is dislocated, people who should be long dead interact with this as-if me, there is no possible clarification of the generations. The I who observes, the me from this world, unshaven, gaunt, and in pajamas, after three days of being sick in bed: hiding behind bushes, afraid of being caught, of asking too many questions that lead up to the key question: what does he (what do the as-if I) do, what is his life made of, what is he known for?

Since too many questions would lead to this haggard alien being, from another timeline (from our own timeline), being imprisoned, thought mad. A painful if understandable judgment, a reminder of something I already know: as we are told over and over by so many wise people, you can only live the life you’ve got, play the hand you’ve dealt; and therefore the ridiculous game of imagining a life spent playing a different hand can only lead to incoherence, disorientation, confusion – hiding….

The City

Stepping along the steel edges of intersections, people in precisely cut suits walk quickly through the icy air past elongated glass windows protecting neat arrays of crystal, ebony-handled carving sets, and thin, pale diamonds. The edges of all these things extend out in a net of lines infinitely narrow, infinitely sharp, a labyrinth of slashing blades. The people walk carefully but as rapidly as possible, watching for traps, concealed mechanisms. They move past each other without looking, but occasionally they misread subliminal signals, forget obliquely worded instructions, make missteps, fall from an edge that they meant to follow as far as the eye can see; then they are brought, however accidentally, face to face, turning towards each other sharp lips or livid cheeks, the rage of a fat man in gray, the malice of a woman with long red hair.

The air turns colder, a shrill wind cuts past the closed windows of buildings. Guns are sold and locks are tested, and the gray of the sky seems to become heavier, denser. Newspapers with large headlines and photographs of executions blow through the streets, past boarded storefronts and their bolted doors. Heavy men with hidden weapons stand alert in open squares, young men and women wearing zippered black clean their knives at the entrances of parks, and every alley rings with running footsteps.

A little man in a raincoat, followed by a number of birds, carries a crumpled paper bag to a bridge over the fast lane of a freeway. He casts crumbs over the edge in handfuls, watching intently for the intermittent explosions of blood and feathers.

[Los Angeles, 1/19/91-9/30/92]
[Picture: Elizabeth Barton, Night City]

Happy...

anniversary.

This blog is a year old today. I'm rather pleased with where it has taken me – 262 posts, or a hair more than five per week, or one every working day – not too bad for productivity, which is such a bugbear for me (one recalls Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, quoted in Kirchner's brilliant and underrated opera Lily, about desire being clearly his occupation – because "at five o'clock it would knock off by itself"). As for reception/consumption by others, there's not much to say about that, but it is not important.

I would try to write something more substantial, but unfortunately I've had an exasperating cold since Saturday (and aren't colds peculiar – so insignificant in terms of real or serious illness, but nevertheless so exasperating and distracting and miserable).

I was going to try to put together some coherent thoughts on Diamanda's visit, but that will have to wait for when I feel less fuzzy and groggy.

In any case: happy....

Seeing stars

Diamanda Galás is here for two days, performing and giving an interview. Last night's concert was amazing, with astounding piano licks and a ventriloquist's array of voices – but also almost parodic at points, with an edge of blackly camp satire I've rarely seen in her work before. I went backstage to talk to her afterwards, as I've done three or four times over the years; was gratified that she recognized me (she is, after all, a star). I told her I'd taught about her a lot this semester, and that five or six of my students were writing about her – she's always pleased with that.

Unfortunately, I also said several utterly stupid things – I always do this; I can remember managing to annoy such famous figures as Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Michael Frayn, Mauricio Kagel, Al Parker, and a host of others. I get too intimate too fast (some Americans can deal with this, few others of course), and say things that are frankly foolish. You have to be especially careful with Diamanda – although she is exceptionally intelligent and excruciatingly direct, and so doesn't need people baby-talking to her, she is also a great diva and a grand ego; it's no accident that her name closely resembles that of Callas (whom she quoted at me, possibly in order to suggest that I should be more careful in speaking to her).

Ah well. Some of these famous types ultimately forgive me, and even seem to come to like the clumsy honesty – at least they certainly remember me (just how they remember me is, in many cases, another question). There is, ultimately, no way I can ever be anything other than a bit of a jerk; I am long reconciled to that – it is partly why my career and life have drifted the way they have, downward and away from the successful and famous. And perhaps I'm not alone in this – I talked briefly to a bigwig from the concert hall, and he said something bitchy that would have gotten his head taken off if he'd said it within Diamanda's earshot.

Anyway, at the very least, I should be able to remember certain rules, so that I can prevent my relations with the great and powerful from getting any worse:

(a) never compare the star with anyone else or even mention anyone that the star may regard as a rival (this one is particularly hard for me).

(b) never agree in any way with any of the star's self-criticisms.

(c) never hand out your opinion of the star's work until you have a lead from them as to what they want you to think about it.

(d) never imply that the star has changed in any way over the years.

(e) never justify or defend anyone that the star has denigrated or disagreed with.

(f) never express hesitation about writing something adulatory about the star's work.

(g) never, ever, suggest that the star's age is perceptible – or not as perceptible as one might expect, given the facts – or that they look anything other than fabulous.

Maybe I should write these on the back of my hand – or, even more appropriately in this case, tattoo them on my knuckles for permanent reference....

Audient

Lately several colleagues are running Events, starring themselves, or guests... and looking to me expectantly to be in the audience. To be another warm body.

I'm unfortunately not very interested; and I've been avoiding their eyes when they start to hint that they want me to be an audient (or, as a sop to my vanity, a Discussant – oh thanks). Most of the topics aren't quite My Thing, as it were; and I've already done so many concerts, conferences, symposia, over the years, that I protect myself from anything that isn't either really interesting (interesting for me, I mean – I am perfectly willing to admit that all of these things are potentially interesting in the abstract, for someone, somewhere) or enjoyable.

The truth is, I work at a very polyvalent department: lots of stuff going on, in lots of directions – many very remarkable, many trendy directions. Unfortunately, because some of those intellectual/artistic directions get lots of participants and others simply don't, I remain, after five years, the kid on the playground nobody plays with very much, but who trails around after the various groups, asking to play – it's odd, because in other places and institutions (i.e. more metropolitan ones) I've been at the center of ideas, topics, activities. When I first came to the UK, at several conferences, I trailed postgraduates in swarms – they wanted to hear what I had to say about theories, about composers, about musics. But that was down in London, where I was a fascinating alternative to the weight of tradition: interested in semi-traditional topics, but with a sharp twist. Not here, though: because these are the boondocks, the topics are all populist, and I'm a mutant from another planet. All the groups were either attached when I got here, or have been blithely co-opted by one colleague or another; and I have instead been given a position as bureaucrat, the role of herding the students the others attract. It's a bit like being gelded, really.

I have spent a great deal of time and energy nagging others to remember that I exist: how can I play, how can I contribute? Over the years this has become distinctly embarrassing: we now have big chunks of money, new buildings, new playgrounds, but none of them are really associated with my kind of work (although I continue to think, mostly to myself, that some of them could be). And it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to include me in various groups; and it is regarded as a bit tacky, a bit shrill, of me to insist on being included, like a kid who is either too old or too young for all the parties, the one who should just know when he's not wanted. Except, of course, to be in the audience, to listen to others.

So, as I have since I arrived here, I go begging, mostly using my AIDS work, since that's the only thing that makes me unique (and separates me from my more successfully acquisitive colleagues), as opposed to a minor also-ran: and twice this coming month outside organizations have agreed – kindly – to allow me to contribute, for free of course and with no guarantees, to their event schedules. I know perfectly well that none of my colleagues will be at those events – not because they don't like me, just because none of these things are really Their Thing. Perfectly understandable, really.

You will say I'm being arrogant, standoffish: why don't I just go be a part of their audiences, if that's the only way to get into the game? Well, frankly, because I don't much want to. I've listened to many people do many things over the years, and there's nothing so exhausting as trying to focus on words and music you don't really care about. And of course in the 1990s, on an international scene, I got used to having people crowd around me because they wanted to hear what I had to say, because my opinion seemed to matter. It's been hard for me to be so demoted, to become a minor participant in other people's events, a supporting character in other people's stories – frankly, under those circumstances, I'd rather not bother.

It's that most deadly and unanswerable, most insoluble, of isolations: the kid who moves to a far-away country school where he just can't really make any close friends, where there's nobody who really shares his interests. I just wish he'd get out and find someone to play with...

Books (I)

I've been enjoying A Book Addict's Treasury (Rugg & Murphy, 2006) for the second time through. It's yet another of those collections of excerpts, bound in pale paper with simple fonts for the title; but this one is actually quite good – intelligent passages, well chosen, many surprises, really just a lot of very well-chosen, well-written words. Unexpectedly good, actually, as it's not edited by famous people or published by a major publisher – the editrices (?) live in York, rather near here. (This is completely unlike, for instance, the apparently similar but vastly cheesier, and badly edited, The Literary Companion of 2004; which not only reads as though some idiotic publisher's accountant told an underling to go slap together a salable book imitating Schott, but which actually has – horrors – errors of fact in it.)

Some chapters include many descriptions of people's libraries – or of libraries, generally, or of books, etc. Since I've lived in too many different places, and since this particular apartment is unusually pleasant, it makes me feel as though I want to describe my books – to myself, if to no one else; so that I don't forget.

After all, though I can remember the charming small garden apartment in San Francisco, on Collingwood; the amazing hillside apartment there that I had for only a year; the large, dusty but comfortable place I shared with Paul P. for some years in Los Angeles; and also the rather grand Hong Kong apartment that the University gave me – although all those places were fairly pleasant, it's hard for me to remember just what books were where, how the books went. In all the rooms I've lived in since college, there were shelves of books; but since I don't have a very good memory (a result, I think, of being a book person – things vanish from memory when you live by the page, just as becoming a good sightreader makes musicians poor at memorizing) I don't exactly remember how things were in those places. I know that the Los Angeles apartment had a large kitchen, and there were books and papers tucked into odd corners of my rather small bedroom; but I can't quite picture the whole thing – or at least not without a vague sense that it must have looked bizarre and possibly pathetic to others.

But this apartment is fairly presentable. Acutely IKEA-cized, full of Billy and Benno shelves, practically the entire thing is beechwood. The front room, which includes a rather unfortunately multi-colored sofa that has become increasingly lumpy, and an intimidating array of consumer electronics in black metal, is a sort of nerve center for the apartment – all the basic literature on four and a half sets of shelves, plus poetry. And half of the mass-market paperbacks (they have to have their own specially made miniature shelves, otherwise they would waste too much space – nine shelves where the other bookcases only have six), and all the DVDs, and in some corners a few of the videotapes.

All that 'basic literature' is – well, what is it? Lots of novels, essays, some scattered 'nonfiction' (such a bizarre category that is). It's basically the things that don't fit well into the more subject-oriented sections, most of which are in the middle room, which includes my desk – which are, mostly: philosophy/culture/semiotics; plays and scripts; books on AIDS; reference (with travel guides, books on writing, books on languages); and a few smaller subject areas, such as psychology, media, etc., although the latter keep getting pushed into the storage room (a disaster that need resolution – there is at least another bookcase worth of books stacked precariously in there among the boxes, that need to be on a shelf somewhere).

So: call it 'everything else'; – but since this is my own library, and I don't like everything that is published (unlike some of the more manic bibliophiles), there are strong threads running through even the 'everything else': lots of science fiction (this whole area has been revived in the past five or six years by Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks and Science Fiction Masterworks series, which have given me a fairly dependable way of buying good science fiction/fantasy without bothering with all the horribly written three-volume messes that drag the field so far down); lots of novels, generally of an experimental, formalist, or bizarre cast (I'm not very interested in people's Personal Stories™ – I vastly prefer peculiar ideas, structures, and sentences that attract attention to themselves; it's no accident that, of famously difficult books, I still respond to Joyce's Ulysses with great affection, having read it in 'independent study' in high school).

One unfortunate problem of some of those novels: being as most of them are very twentieth-century modernist (okay, Sterne excepted), they tend to be rather bleak. As I've mentioned before in this blog, after some of the disasters that hit me in the late 1990s and early twenty-first, I became seriously unwilling to read depressing novels for a long time. That made reading tricky – practically any novelist tries to create conflicts that put characters in miserable positions, and it's exactly that misery that put me off for some years; many books didn't get finished because I just couldn't face the predicaments of the characters, not on top of my own.

A complicated example, but one that I managed to finish, was Nabokov's Ada; probably the longest and most realistic of his mature novels, it races along for nearly half its length when Van, Ada and Lucy are young and full of ideas (and certain other things of course, as you would know if you read it); then it slows as the characters get older, and gets immensely dull and turgid, sort of dimly lit for hundreds of pages. But I remember the startlingly ecstatic realization, towards the end, that fighting my way through the second half was absolutely and amazingly worth it: the abrupt but graceful tragedy of Lucy's choices and the aged clarity of the last pages could only have the power they have if you'd fought your way through the rest of it.

So: hard books are often worth reading. Sometimes not, of course; when I got through M. John Harrison's Light last year (intellectual British science fiction), which took some work because of the density of the concepts involved, I remember thinking: meh – a rather weak and simplistic ending to a hugely complex set of problems. Oh well, it happens. And of course there are all those modernist novels that are so cynical, so caught up in a dark network of cleverness, that you just know without finishing them that everyone will lose in the end (Gaddis, Burgess, Broch's Sleepwalkers). Frankly, who needs misery, especially when won at such great cost?

Okay, more when I feel like it. An endless topic: like a list of Sei Shonagon's that can just go on and on and....