in the hall of mirrors

Still

No wind, no moving air, a rather dull gray sky – you can hear a dog barking from very far away. Hardly anybody walking in the streets. It's very warm – for here – about 75° F.

It's the kind of atmosphere they use in horror, tragedy, nihilistic psychological novels, etc., when something dreadful is about to happen. However, it doesn't feel threatening in any way – just strangely, quietly, still.

***

Incidentally, reading a bit of Lovecraft – and yes, I think I've had enough now; I'm reminded that I really don't like having the ideas or images of horror fiction in my head – made me think: genre fictions all have different sets of limitations and patterns, of course, and they all try to generate flexibility and variation despite those limitations; but the real problem with horror fiction, much more than the others, is that it always has to have the same ultimate tone, that of, well, horror. However you delay it or prepare it or come away from it, something horrific has to happen – even if only in the language or the imagination.

Now that, for me, is an exceptionally important limitation: not only because I don't particularly like the horrific, myself – but because, in an annoying way, you always have some sense of how things are going to go. You may not know the exact structure or timing or means, but you do always know that the horror story can't end up being witty and cheerful, or a tiny bit sad, or comforting – you know, unavoidably, it will be... well, horrific.

Which, for me, especially justifies not reading the stuff....

Unspeakable

I'm not normally a great fan of Lovecraft – yes, many of the stories are well-written, and he has a lot of remarkable ideas; but the heavy reliance on "unspeakable", "unfathomable", "eldritch" and a handful of other words and ideas that seem to pop up at least once in every damned paragraph of his work is tiresome. Metaphorically, it makes my teeth ache.

I think Clark Ashton Smith was actually a more skilled writer, although he also overdid it in florid stylistics, and his ideas aren't quite as remarkable (though they range over more territory, with more different moods).

But lately I managed to get addicted to an electronic card game based on that ol' Cthulhu mythos. It's very entertaining – the game maker has had a good time designing something rather complicated and somewhat funny, complete with sanity points.

And that amusing game brought me back to Lovecraft and such... fortunately a nearby used book store, Black Flame, has a shelf or two of Lovecraft-related books, and I bought one. It's funny to get back to his work... and funnier to see how many people online are fascinated with Cthulhu in various guises: many of them seem to want to figure it out, to find out the 'facts'.

Of course the lovely joke is... it only works as a fictional technique when less information is given, rather than more. The style really started (after Ambrose Bierce, who did something slightly different) with Robert Chamber's The Yellow King; the four stories he wrote concerned with that nonexistent play were brilliant, and the maddening lacunae and inconsistencies merely made it better.

And I'll admit: it made me want to know everything I could about that unreal object, the play that drove people mad... it's not quite like the lacunae of, say, Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur, but not completely different from it.

Unspeakable!...

Ennuyé

On a day when I was feeling rather – I don't know – bored – by either writing or not writing, by the smallness of my life as it is... by going to restaurants or staying home, by all the things I'm not doing on this Labor Day weekend, by the holidays and end of summer and such –

and have been thereby thinking: how do people stand their lives, why aren't they all incredibly bored, even the ones who are so much busier than I am?...

and I'll admit that I'm also probably a bit hung over after an evening out celebrating with Catherine that she got her PhD; and meeting a very sexy bartender, who probably didn't notice my existence, except for tips, but whom I thought about afterwards; and then today not getting up until noon, then doing things around the house for four or five hours and only leaving the house by main force and finally eating a meal at 5 pm... which probably explains feeling kind of uninterested in existence and stuff, as Wittgenstein didn't say but probably should have...

but still wondering about other people, and how although I don't want lives like theirs perhaps their lives seem more interesting from the inside, and wondering whether they're bored too, and...

and I am answered, I suppose, by finally finishing, desultorily, Noël Coward's Semi-Monde, a play he wrote in 1926 and never staged. Apparently because it was too overtly gay, but probably also because it is overtly rather experimental (Coward as closet avantgardiste?), consisting largely of fragments of different people's lives in a French hotel bar: gay and straight, men and women, they marry or form couples and are unfaithful and jealous and break up.

And the ultimate point, that you are supposed to draw from the complexly overlaid chatter, is that it is all essentially circular, repetitive: that the entire complex pattern of night lives and loves are always the same, only the players change, and for the most part they only change a little bit. Glasgow Citizen's Theatre first performed it in 1977, and they were probably hard put to make it fascinating – it is essentially Waiting for Godot for the cocktail set, for what used to be called the jet set; so they tried to make it hyper-decadent, in a production with lots of mirrors. But it's not really decadent, it's just... well, it's about empty lives; and it's fairly empty.

And well, all right, I'm clearly influenced by Coward's dialogue style (except without the brilliant wit – which is in any case sparse in this script, it's not that kind of play, it's more sentimental-slice-of-life, though supposedly many slices of what are on the surface brilliant lives, but sorry about the lack of wit in any case); but I am thereby reassured, I supposed, that my boring little academic life is no worse than anything else....

But, hell, I already knew that.

Incidentally...

A footnote to the above mention of Semi-Monde; I've predated it so that this appears below it.

One of the odd jewels of my book collection is something I came upon almost by accident – where was it, I wonder? – in the old days working in the Gifts & Exchange section of the Smithsonian Libraries, where many volumes that were hopelessly inappropriate for even their many branches appeared, and we were allowed to take them before they went off to the Library of Congress slush pile; or perhaps in a San Francisco, or a Los Angeles book shop....

In any case, it's extremely oversized, so it is weird that I would manage to keep it over the years – here, I will measure it for you: it is 16-1/2" x 10-1/2", a bizarre and very large size for a book. (Perhaps that's 'folio?' I have a lot of scores of around this size at the office, but they aren't at home of course.)

In fact, the special bookshelves I had made in Hong Kong in unusual sizes – ugly and clunky but solid, thoroughly amateurish but they do the job (I shouldn't have asked a British emigré to make them; imagine what kind of workmanship I might have had if I'd been smart enough to ask a Chinese woodworker) – were made to fit this book and everything smaller. And somehow this oversized, impossible book, only half an inch thick, has made it with me, not particularly damaged.

It is simply a book of photographs of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre; all black and white, all different productions, all incredibly beautiful. No date, no copyright (the librarian in my tuts at these lacks), but it must have been around 1983-4, as those are the last festival dates listed. Big, big pictures, which is why the book is so wonderful; and the plays they chose to do – famous antiques, things I've never heard of, and various half avant-garde masterpieces that you would think were impossible to pull off successfully.

It's a book of desires, at least for me: I would so very, very much have wanted to see some of these productions – to see, in person, how they somehow made Karl Kraus' insanely long, insanely awkward The Last Days of Mankind work; that they did amazing things with Woyzeck, with Sartre, with Chekhov; how they did weird transforms of Shakespeare, Brecht, Genet; to see their love of artifice, of heavily emphasizing the masks and artificiality of Goldoni, Hofmannsthal, Coward, and playing with it, stripping it piece by piece....

Last rose of summer

I know it's not really the end of summer, not quite yet: it is still three weeks before the meetings that introduce the semester start, four weeks before the students arrive; and although we've had a lot of wet, cold weather, there will still be warm days off and on for that month.

But it's Bank Holiday weekend, the one that marks the end of summer here; and in a weekend it's Labor Day weekend, the end of summer in the US. Everyone is away, having fun, usually in heavily planned ways – Susan and Rob are in Sitges, and for the first time in years I'm not joining them; Patrick and Colin are in Manchester for Gay Pride this weekend, and I'm not joining them.

It's also sort of the commercial gay pride weekend here in Newcastle – which means a chance to go to the local clubs and watch people get incredibly drunk, which doesn't seem terribly interesting. But at least they're doing something. And even the two tall young men who appear to be visiting the downstairs neighbors – in their absence? – were staying up until six and playing music (not very loudly but annoyingly enough). Which means even people I don't want to party with are partying.

All a bit of a shame, a bit disappointing: but not very much, because I've stayed here voluntarily (for the most part, anyway, even if the government has my passport for a few weeks), and have gotten writing done, which means the summer isn't as depressingly wasted as it usually is.

But it feels a little bit sad, to give up seeing people, going places, having fun, having a break: when my passport comes back I may find myself a weekend somewhere to make up for it....

There are strawberries and raspberries in piles in all the shops, that rot almost before you've gotten them home. I should live on smoothies.

Meanwhile it is sunny and beautiful; I still have to finish that paper, today I think, but I'll do so sitting in pleasant cafés.

***

And today is Hans-Rainer's birthday, so I should phone him. Have I ever told you about Hans-Rainer – the greatest romantic hope of my years after Reid's death?...

Hans-Rainer is a handsome, black-bearded German, about my age. When I lived in Germany for fifteen months in 1993-4, I did indeed meet lots of men; but Hans-Rainer was the great one, the one I wanted to live with. A former East German (ehemalige Ossi), he lived in the countryside around Berlin; at first his English was nonexistent, and his German peculiarly peppered with country proverbs and metaphors that I could barely follow. (Imagine meeting someone who explains things, in another language, by saying something like, "It's that or pluck chickens" – very confusing for an urban guy like me.)

But friendly, charming, sexy, and wonderful: every time we met during that year (when he came into Berlin), we would spend days at a time in bed – up to three, or four or five, days, not leaving the apartment and hardly leaving the bed, not seeing any good reason to leave it. My younger sister said: you marry the ones you can talk to – and, although he isn't an educated man, we would talk endlessly about – I don't know what, but we were happy doing it.

Some charming moments: when he got all impressed with how he looked in leather, and in khaki, and all sorts of other gay ghetto standards, in the mid-1990s – in East Germany he'd never had access to these things; he sent me pictures that he was so touchingly proud of, that he looked so cool. And driving his little Trabant, those incredibly miserably cheap East German cars, which was too small for him, and which required him leaning forward and putting all his energy into keeping the little 'Papi' (the nickname for Trabants, because they were practically made of paper) moving....

Since 1994, we often call each other, from one place or another; his English has greatly improved, although it is still pretty basic. I've often suggested he visit me here, but he never has much money – he's not great at holding onto his jobs, or for that matter  boyfriends; not because he's a horrible person, but just because he tends not to stay focused. A flaw I was happy to overlook; in latter years he's managed to work as a gardener, and remember to show up to work on a regular basis.

I'll call him today; perhaps I should send him a plane ticket for here....

Wicked, wicked boy

So work on articles and book has dribbled to – not quite nothing, but very little. And, caught on the prongs of guilt over not keeping up with my energetic co-editor, I find myself reading pointless comics (Hellblazer) and light books... in between bits of Improving Literature, such as Jungians on dream work and Boice on, well on not procrastinating.

Hmm. Where does this sense of myself as bad – wicked, careless, slothful, useless – come from so strongly? All embedded in the general context of endless reading, reading like stuffing my face with junk food, and being criticized for the addiction or indulgence it represents.

Admittedly, if I'm going to waste time, reading Hellblazer is perhaps a bad idea, with its violence, darkness, cynicism and prevailing atmosphere of the general wickedness ascribed to both hell and heaven. That may be where I'm getting this strange resonance – as though my procrastination is tied to something in me that is all about feeling bad about myself. As though I can't work because I'm not worth doing the work, or something peculiar and not particularly sensible like that.

As though some stupid thing some adult said to me when I was young, or some misinterpreted situation from which I drew some neurotic conclusion, is running me....

Which is, of course, probably the case. Sigh. Onward....

Symptomatic

Sorry I'm not blogging very often; still feeling a bit distant/reserved from the blog after the messes with TypePad; and still a bit uncomfortable with its new interface, which is technically better but more complicated (which is of course distracting from the business of actually writing).

An interesting discovery, an uncovering, at my doctor's appointment two and a half weeks ago, which I've been thinking about a lot. The HIV consultant told me that the arthritic symptoms in my right hand – and, more importantly, depression symptoms – are increasingly regarded as being typical of hepatitis C. And he prefaced all this by saying he had been nervous – did he say 'scared'? – about telling me all of this....

Very odd, to me, but illuminating. It is odd that he would not want to tell me all this – out of, I suppose, concerns about predisposing me to depression? many doctors think that way – given that I talk about symptoms, experiences, problems, quite bluntly, clearly, professionally, with him and with the medical students we give presentations to, and to the psychologist. I'm practically a professional (although of course I did become a 'difficult' patient for two months this spring over the questions of treatment and its implications).

Of course what this actually means is the opposite of what he was worried it would mean – the information is liberating, calming. Think about it: if depression is a common symptom of hepatitis C – not a result of worrying about the infection, but actually a result of the infection itself – then much of my depression since I was diagnosed with it in the fall of 2000, and possibly some time before (it is impossible to say when I was infected – it could be any time back to the late 1970s – and it is hard to say exactly when the virus might have had an effect on me before my first 'acute' presentation around November 2000) is not a function of my own weakness, my own loneliness, the gray skies of Newcastle, the isolations of Hong Kong and Newcastle, the disaster of the Australian career collapse: it is a symptom, something that happens in the body as a result of the infection.

Yes, of course: I know that the causes are all mixed in together, and that the gray dimness of my life since arriving here in 2002 has created a lot of grayness inside me. But the liberatory side of it, the sense of distancing and objectification of the insidious depression: the sense that it has a source which is outside of me – that is very freeing, a great relief, and it gives me a valuable place to stand, from which I can perhaps have more control over, more impact on, my own life.

Not that I'm interested in psychotropic drugs – I still don't trust them, though they're better than they used to be. But the sense that I can perhaps strive against depression (which, in any case, I haven't felt much this year) without striving against myself gives me extra strength....

***

And it is a rainy Sunday: but I would like to get work done. Before the alarm went off I'd already done some rather professionalized dream interpretation, using Johnson's Inner Work to help me.

And did I mention that I have this new, imagined, not completely impossible goal: that I could study to be a Jungian analyst?... although Jung liked for analysts to have already had other careers, and to be at least thirty years old or so, my age and problematic health prognoses may make this an implausible career aim. But the idea that I could do such a thing is rather fun to play with....

Pillar to post

Irritable today... after spending too much money on things I don't really want, while feeling pushed from one thing to another – £750 for the privilege of staying in the UK, £440 for new glasses with frames I don't quite like. Phone calls to government agencies and chain stores, lots of voicemail and people apologizing but-it's-out-of-their-hands. Feeling at the effect of systems, administrations, corporations, institutions: a university that treats me offhandedly, saving money on me when it can; the governments that don't really want me in one country or another....

Big, sloppy, greedy, belching organizations.

At what point in one's career is there enough money, or respect or control of situations, that this isn't a constant aspect of contact with any organization?

Or perhaps it is a cluster of unsettled, frustrating dreams I don't even – quite – remember.

Last night was a pretty good conversation with David R., who always wants to talk about his Zen readings these days. These conversations are often several steps above any others available to me – though they are often a bit too abstract; it would be good if we could manage to be less conceptual about awareness, and about what really matters, and somehow state it in more concrete, more immediate terms.

Perhaps that's all it is: that any glimpse of trying to live a more adequate or real or sensible life clashes with the somewhat tiresome one that I've got instead....

To the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

[A grumpy letter to the festival. Perhaps I should sign myself Brigadier-General, as in those parody Monty Python letters to the Times.]

Dear LLGFF,

So the 22nd London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is on tour; and just three movies from its series will come to Newcastle, at the Tyneside Cinema, in mid-August, with about a week's notice through flyers in the cinema itself.

And there are at least three disappointments: that it was scheduled so late and casually (we didn't make the brochure this year, but are on a sticker attached to the brochure instead); Newcastle dates aren't mentioned on the LLGFF website, even today; and, most frustratingly for me, neither of the films about HIV+ men (Derek or Before I Forget) are coming here. Instead we're getting a lesbian film, a film about gay guys who act nearly straight, and a Gregg Araki film with no gay or lesbian content which has somehow weaseled into the already very skimpy programme.

As an 'aging' (51 y.o.) gay man with AIDS, who is a member of the local HIV patient group and who speaks fifteen or twenty times a year at a variety of classes and public venues about my experiences, I'm accustomed to semi-humorously dismissing the awareness of the local scene about either men or HIV. Although there are nearly six hundred HIV patients in the Northeast, and more than a third of them gay men, and probably more of those in the 'aging' category than not, I understand that the lesbian contingent tends to be more active here; and that nobody in the Northeast is ever very interested in the HIV+ community anyway.

I also understand that the Tyneside Cinema, although it has Neil Tennant as a major patron, has other things to do than pay much attention to the LLGF festival every year. It is always scheduled in August, when the fewest people are around; it always involves very few films, tucked in a corner as it were; and it is always hugely underpublicized.

I also understand, as I am myself a foreigner from California who moved here six years ago, that LGBT culture in the UK happens mostly in London and Manchester, and that nobody in London normally gives a toss about the provinces, especially the distant Northeast.

But it's still acutely disappointing. Six years in the UK provinces has made me accustomed to the mildly contemptuous disinterest of Londoners and their well-funded institutions, the uninvolvement of locals, and the avoidant boredom that the local community seems to feel at any mention of HIV; and of course it's disappointing to consider another pointless exercise by Araki that has nothing to do with anyone's personal experiences or needs up here.

But I can't help feeling that it could all be different.

Cheers,

...

[Sent also to the Tyneside Cinema, via its apparently carefully screened website e-mail, as well as to various LG figures in the Northeast.]

***

Hmm, well, helpful and polite answers from the LLGFF and the Tyneside Cinema, which have left me pretty mollified: it appears that they are going to show seven of the nine films from the tour, including both of the ones I want to see, but in two groups (the second in September). So clearly My Demographic, such as it is, is also included in this festival.

I still think that London institutions tend to ignore the UK provinces, but it appears that this one isn't doing that.

And I am still unenchanted to see Gregg Araki pushed to the front of the queue, but I guess that's a matter of personal taste....

Mamma mia

Well, well, two summer blockbuster films in one week: quite bizarre for me.

David C. and David R. wanted to go; I argued that I didn't really want to see Mamma Mia, but they wanted to, and it sounded pleasant to spend the time with them, so I went.

Well.

I suppose there are a host of reasons why I could expect not to like much of the film, including:

1. I'm not a fan of ABBA.

2.

... well actually that's sort of it, right there.

But that's enough. I do know that one of the only false notes struck in my time in Australia, as I was lamenting being sent away from Sydney, which looked so much like the promised land at the time, was that for some unfathomable reason the natives – practically all of them, as far as I could tell – really, really like ABBA. With no irony. It was, I suppose, the canker in the apple.

Okay, well, back to the present, such as it is: Meryl Streep is excellent, she's the best thing in the film, she's the only one you believe most of the time. Her backup girls, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, are also fun to watch, although neither one does as much as their fans might have hoped. The only good musical numbers belong to the older women, when they're camping it up and making fun of themselves – everyone else is boring. Extremely boring.

Except, of course, the chorus of Greek [sic] boys. David R. liked the little one with the shaved head (who looked like a quasi-Greek version of a local Geordie lad, which is probably why he liked him – but who was actually, I'm sure, either a Broadway or a West End chorine with a trendoid look). I preferred the big one with the shoulders and the head of hair (whom I suspect was a nice Argentine lad named Juan Pablo di Pace, though it's hard to tell as the choristers rush past). In fact I kept elbowing both or either David when the studly one appeared; so it was rather wonderful when Colin Firth, in a sudden moment of rather unprepared gayness, jumps to embrace him at the end. (And isn't that one in the eye for all those British girls who swooned over Pride and Prejudice.)

Oh, and the brief, completely ridiculous choreography for the lads at the pier was funny. That was about twenty seconds' worth.

So that's another one well off the list (good thing I really don't have a Feature Film List, at least not a current one – that's the problem with buying DVDs, most movies are not worth seeing twice, or once).

But it was nice to see boys being sexy... of course since they were musical chorus boys no doubt they're all straight (ha ha)... and Meryl was actually quite good, almost throughout (although why was her big dramatic solo cut so awkwardly? must have been a lot of takes)... and it's nice to see old people (i.e. in their forties and fifties) finding love and/or sex and lots of fun on a Greek island.

Bodes well for me, I guess.

[PS: it appears that Juan Pablo di etc., a dancer/model/actor, is the same lad who was in the news for objecting to having his genitals airbrushed smaller in the Rigoletto poster. Hmm. A nice Argentine boy, with bells on....]