in the hall of mirrors

NYC - WDC - NYC

A trip to the US: going through New York to get to northern Virginia, for my mother's memorial service; and back to New York for four busy days.

From the beginning, the sheer ease of things was startling: the flight to New York, the early landing, an almost unbelievably efficient and relaxed JFK – I almost didn't recognize it all...

The memorial itself was emotionally calm, rather than sad. A lot of memories, endlessly discussed by the family staying at my brother-in-law's (which immediately morphed into a crowd comfortable with each other, as though we hadn't lived miles apart for years); plus a surprisingly large number of neighbors and relatives coming to the cemetery, dinner at a restaurant, and back to the house afterwards. Arlington Cemetery was, as always, a calm arrangement in grays and whites; gentle humor and remembrances floated among a lot of people who hadn't seen each other for years.

If you click on the picture, you might see that my father and my mother are actually in the canisters that held my father's developing fluid (for photographs). Back in 2000, when he died, it seemed right (in an admittedly affectionately odd way) to use these canisters as burial urns – we used one for my sister a few years ago (she's around the corner from my parents, about two rows away), then a third for my mother. Chalk it up to family peculiarity; hopefully the cemetery managers won't find out.

Back at my brother-in-law's, an afternoon and evening spent talking about everything under the sun... My sister had made a mural of photographs from my mother's life – I've seen perhaps half of them before, but many of the earlier ones were new to me. I remember one from the early 1930s, that she didn't use – my Greek grandparents with their three children; although her elder sister and brother look as assertive as they did throughout their lives, my mother looks, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, remarkably shy, frankly frightened. Later pictures show her shifting back and forth between shyness and cheerfulness, until the point – perhaps in her late 20s? – when she became strikingly beautiful for a time, when she began to look generally cheerful and happy with her life.

Driving back to New York, we were quieter, basically worn out. But from Sunday midday until Wednesday afternoon, I made a remarkable number of visits, personal and professional and mixed – and everyone seemed remarkably cheerful: people looked well, seemed busy, and were ready for spring, for new projects, for enthusiastically diving into any number of things. I was frankly surprised at how easy it was to restart where we had left off, after not seeing many of them for a decade or more (though in many cases that problem was smoothed over by Facebook – it's really useful for those of us who live far away from our pasts).

Mary Jo: hours of talking in her beautiful kitchen as she made a meal, packed to go away for some weeks to an Equity show outside the city, and took pictures of us on her roof (which will someday be reborn as a roof garden). Dinner with Trudy, and her husband Frank and a friend-composer Eric who flew in from the Left Coast – Trudy's fantastic curry and salad, plus a rapid criss-crossing discussion of everything happening in musical New York. Lunch with Libby in the sunshine, talking about her daughter, her husband, her work at Yale, and connections I could help her with for their archive.

Then waltzing off with Laura to the last big event to be held in Merce Cunningham's studio before it closes forever – seeing Pauline Oliveros get a prize, bumping into Carl Stone, and unexpectedly meeting Rhodri Davies, a young grantee composer who lives about five miles from me, right here in northern England (he's now invited to come speak to our students). Then a relaxed late Italian dinner back at Laura's hotel, where the staff have obviously decided that she is their favorite guest (understandable, as she often stays there, and is pretty lovable – as are many of the people mentioned here).

A visit to Meredith Monk's office, then walking over to her studio (well, I got confused about which address was which) went extraordinarily well – I finally met Peter (and got a pile of CDs and DVDs and reviews and such), then a long talk with Meredith over tea in her studio, which was sunnier in the spring light than I'd ever seen it. Lots of materials, lots of plans, getting to work there too, after letting that project slide for too long.

A relaxed Italian lunch with Melanie, who is away from her Irish home in New York on a grant, brought me through the NYU music department – and lo and behold, Suzanne, in a high-fashion pair of shoes (how can I describe them – sort of a silver techno-glitter?), and Michael, both of whom greeted me as a long-lost friend (though I haven't seen either in at least a decade). A last dinner with my sister and her husband, who put up with me for nearly a week in the midst of very busy schedules – sleeping in their crowded living room... we went to Ethiopian, which I'd been craving for a few months, and even had a choice of Ethiopian beers. (And then, after Ethiopian beer, decided we needed to test the meme of the Peep in the Microwave, only to be defeated by accidentally buying – I kid you not – sugarless, diet Peeps. Bummer.)

And a final busy tour of the Manhattan version of the Jung Institute – rapid connections with an amazingly helpful librarian (many photocopies); chatting with the pleasant Swedish women who run ARAS, the vast image archive; and a brief word with the guy in the bookstore, who sent me back with a query to refer to Zürich....

All very professional, cheerful. Even, generally, exciting: a confident moving-into-the-future that I've missed too often in the past decade.

I guess this all sounds like boasting (sorry about that). But, after so much whinging about being far from things, about feeling ineffective and forgotten by the wider, busier, more successful world, it was frankly startling – this, after all, is what success feels like....

The City

It will be obvious to anyone who has read much of this blog that San Francisco still has, nearly thirteen long years after I last lived there, an intense fascination (or should I say obsession?) for me.

My love of small, beautiful cities, of gently artistic, liberal people, of hillside houses, of small neighborhoods stamped with vivid characters – a love that has been applied to my various experiences of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Sydney, Vancouver, and other cities that have at least some of those elements – is deeply embedded in my years in San Francisco (in the waking world, 1979-84 and 1992-6), and of course I always feel fairly unhappy (and admittedly a bit bedeviled) by my long exile from there.

Some of my strongest dreams have created eerie images of a San Francisco transformed, inventions of my imagination that I can still bring easily into my mind's eye: walking down a transformed Castro Street, cafés and shops burnished with a slightly golden glow in an evening bustling with happy, chatting people, paned sixteenth-century windows bulging outward, showing candlelit tables covered with beautiful objects inside the buildings; another transformed San Francisco of bamboo, pine totem sculptures and sunny weather, in levels separated by flowing, hand-carved banisters of tropical woods; and that dark, damaged San Francisco of grimy, rainy nights, abandoned buildings, wrecked cars, and people in dirty clothes fleeing from shadow to shadow....

Last night's San Francisco was the most unexpected yet: a truly immense city, climbing from the ocean beach, with huge, beautifully inventive buildings climbing a curving ridge, miles long, that ascends into impenetrable fog. A vast structure in a spiral, like a much larger Guggenheim Museum, filled with levels that hold smaller buildings along garden streets. Although the dream had a milder version of my usual frustrations in the background – dreamed endeavors to improve my station from temporary hired foreign servant to actually living there: a familiar mindset by now – it was still so calmly grand, so glorious, that when I wrote the dream down for my next analysis session I instinctively titled it: City of God.

A strange name coming from me – I can't really stand Augustine, and one of the sore points in my Jungian studies has been my lack of interest in medieval Christian imagery; although some of what I've been reading in von Franz over the past two months has made me feel a bit less uncomfortable about that, a bit more aware that such imagery can be meaningful, even for me.

But then it just seemed, well, I suppose the phrase has to be: so perfect....

From Berlin

[Something I wrote in 1989... and now it is the twentieth anniversary of these events.]

Amazed, sitting in a restaurant and reading of the collapse of the Wall, that vast shift in the meaning of our world’s past.  The bizarre responses of people, Easterners who stay up all night and see real, free capitalist stores opening, Westerners bursting into the national anthem, children taking chunks of the Wall for souvenirs.  It draws me back into the Jefferson Airplane’s grand anthem: "I smell incense and balloons...  People dancing everywhere, people shouting: I don’t care..."  Their grandchildren will perhaps see a sort of monument, a mile of the Wall preserved in memory of those who died, those who couldn’t wait long enough – a weather-beaten concrete mass, in front of which their elders become oddly quiet...

Over my chicken teriyaki I am subjected to a subliminal flash, a momentary nightmare that draws out and expands:

Tonight’s edition of News 4/North includes interviews with the citizens of West LA. on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wall... they speak to our reporters of the strange pressures of living in this opulently capitalist territory, bounded on the west by the sea, on the north by the radioactive ruins of Encino and Tarzana, and on the east and south, by the massive gray concrete of the Wall:

Kimberly: “I had a brother in Culver City before the war; when I was a teenager, we always went down there for Sunday dinners... I get mail from him about twice a year, but most of it is deleted by Orange censors...”

Scott: “My student activist group was really freaked when they started imprisoning the AIDS patients in Silverlake, but we feel that the riots by West Angelenos helped in forcing the Orange government to release them to the North...”

Jason: “We met this old woman in a bar the other night who said she saw the firebombing of Malibu... she said the really big stars used to live there... I don’t know if any of it was true, but we bought her a drink before we went dancing at the club...”

DeeDee: “I was only seven when the Wall went up, right after the War; but I still remember my father being able to drive straight through from downtown to the beach, with no soldiers and no checkpoints...  He was one of the ones working downtown, trapped down there when they began the Siege; there was nothing we could do...  We heard about him once a few months after the war, but nothing in the years since...  I hope he’s still alive somewhere.”

West Los Angeles residents rioted again today along the section of the Wall that follows old Highland Avenue; they were protesting the execution of five East Angeleno workers who tried to escape Orange-controlled East LA at the Santa Monica Boulevard checkpoint...  This is the third riot since April, when the Prime Minister in Anaheim instituted the new Race Reform Laws, prohibiting members of the Hispanic population of all Orange territories from Party and management positions...  Executive President Brown, speaking from the Northern capital of San Francisco, spoke against what he called “this outrage”...

Citizens of the Free City of Vancouver today declared their solidarity with the workers of West LA in the current airlift crisis.  In this declaration, they join Federation officials in San Francisco and the President of the Republic of Greater Texas, who spoke yesterday in Tulsa to a large crowd of supporters...  Grateful West Angelenos cheered the announcement at city government headquarters in Beverly Square beneath a memorial statue of freedom fighter Sean Penn...  The airlift is rapidly becoming crucial to the life of the city; it is said that a half-pound container of tofu costs four hundred and eighty New dollars, and precious avocados are hoarded by West LA housewives...

This issue of Harper’s/North is dedicated to new young writers living inside the Wall in West LA.  Since the Wall went up twenty-five years ago this month, West LA has become the center of the avant-garde in contemporary art and literature...  The strange feel of this beleaguered city is captured by young people who have known no other way of life: a city characterized by a frenetic night life, frequent and open drug use, political rallies, all-night parties, riots, and a peculiarly defiant capitalism that has created the highest rates of consumption and inflation of any city in the Northwest Federation, comparable to that of the city of New York before its destruction...

Maybe we already have a Wall.

[11/16/89-11/30/91]

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]

LA '89

He pulls back the brake, turning his head. Pressure of the gear shift. Bare arm and vinyl. Warm, bright air, a slight glare. Can’t see. Growl of the engine. He backs towards the red Porsche...

Hand on the brake, he pulls. Up. Feet on the clutch and brake, his head turns, he feels the breeze on the sweat of his forehead. A cough. Yanking back, turning, he sees...

Grabbing the brake, pulling. Foul exhaust laced with jasmine. Head turning, eyes away from the glare, a pull in the neck muscles, pain, feet lifting from the clutch as...

Hand still on the brake, window, sour air, noise of the street behind, slight headache, pulling, neck turning, too fast, gasp...

Reaching for the brake, turning, look, red Porsche, fast: how far, turning head back, arm, tired, pulling...

Hand on the parking brake, grip, smooth, upward, look, jasmine, exhaust, glare, pulling...

Letting go of the brake...

[Los Angeles, 11/8/89]

Dis/location

Late night television: at certain points – somewhere among the fragments of Robot Chicken, The L Word, and a long advertisement for a CD set of 'Classic Soul' – there are so many echoing fragments of Los Angeles: Industry in-jokes, with night views behind a talking head through a plate glass window, clearly in a house in the hills – Topanga, Laurel, other canyons; shots of the 405 above UCLA, in sight of the Getty; all the cloud of knowing references, tropes, common views and images. Because certain shows tend to emphasize their Hollywood sources – especially casually produced ones – the television screen makes watchers into inhabitants of a Greater LA.

Which gives me strange, disoriented sense of never having left LA... and, with the realization that I'm not really there, am in fact on another continent and a number of degrees of latitude to the north, there is a sense of being out of it: of being away from the center of things, in the provinces, in the boonies, uncool. Much as, in different eras and under different influences, someone would have felt far from Paris, or far from London, or far from New York.

But of course LA has better weather than any of those....

Promises

Friday: a day of things whose colors were muted, rather dull colors mixed with gray; but those things, quiet and apparently unimportant, were nonetheless good, and important.

Reading Sontag on Goodman and Artaud, for no real reason, just because it was the book I picked up on the way to the bus, on the way to the doctor. Thrilling moments, full of that fantastic intelligence, that honesty, flashes of depth that promise to answer the questions that have bothered me lately – that is, how to live in a way that is worthy of its own needs. And such balanced, fused glances at the entire history of the twentieth century – even when that's not the point of the article, her ability to put it all together in such powerful ways. And the dazzling images of how she wrote at the time, in 1972 – a small apartment in Paris, an ascetic approach to life, creating for herself a space to do absolutely nothing but make words....

Then the doctor: casual, a 'professional' visit, where we both know so much of what we're talking about that we practically communicate in telegraphic code. He'll check the tests to see if my worries about my liver matter at all, or are just illusions made out of transient winter viruses; he's a bit concerned about my cholesterol (a side effect of my medications), but we agreed that rather than adding a cholesterol medication just yet, I'll use this as another thing impelling me to get some exercise.

Best of all: Kaletra, the most obnoxious and probably most important medicine I've been taking for – what? seven years now? – has finally been 'reformulated'. It's still basically the same stuff – it still has ritonavir in it, unhappily (doctors like ritonavir because, although it has a miserable effect on fatigue, mood, and the whole gastrointestinal system, it stays in that system, and keeps everything else with it – just what we need, something toxic that sticks around). But the reformulation, reputedly, cuts down on side effects – he says all his patients keep sending him messages saying, thank God, this is so much easier, why didn't they do a reformulation three years ago....

So that's good. Promises of feeling much better.

Online was a Quicktime copy of Wender's Wings of Desire, which I've promised myself I would see for nineteen years, since it first came out – my most interesting teacher at the time, the aggressive but brilliant composer named Paul Reale, considered it a must-see (and, given his anti-minimalist polemics, I'm sure he thought it was an antidote to the whole postmodern wave of 1980s art). It's beautiful, shades of grays and shimmering music (and ideas – why didn't anyone tell me Peter Handke was involved in writing the script), much more surprising and textured, and much more about Berlin than I'd realized – I think I put off seeing it because I was worried that it would be disappointing. It is really a sort of beautiful heartache movie, not just because of what it is, but also because it's about Berlin... which was my first overwhelming experience of a real Europe: huge apartments and those great dark courtyards – a city that gives you so much sheer room – space to live, vast spaces to think and do and act, a city that offers genius amid the rain and the schnauze. But it's also a city that sits heavily on your shoulders: the excitement comes with a cost, that of the sheer heaviness, the darkness, of overwhelming histories, of traditions, of powerful minds and terrible cruelties....

In comparison, my beloved cities – San Francisco, Sydney, Amsterdam – are blithe baubles. And even New York merely seems young, almost tentative, next to Berlin.

So it was a day of promises. Such an important aspect of living – they used to say in est seminars that it was our promises to ourselves that were so important, as they were the sources of everything else in our lives. Unfortunately, I have always been a bit scattered about my promises to myself – not like an uncaring friend, but more like a rather helpless and inept single parent, one who confusedly promises that things will get better, that we'll go to the park, to the circus, and then when there's not any money for the bus simply says, sorry kid, that's the way it goes. Which may be why I am always so saddened, and angered, by my own bad faith with colleagues – books I am supposed to write, research I'm supposed to do, in order to keep promises to Gerhard, to Meredith, to V–....

But the change in medications, the depth of some of the things I read and looked at today, suggests a promise (even in a month like November!) of some kind of renewal: of a new set of promises, that could actually be kept.

AIDS in the World

[Speech for the first World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, December 1, 2004.]

Tonight I’m thinking about some of the places I've lived and visited, and some the people I’ve seen and known, over the last twenty years. Many of those people have been touched by, or concerned about, AIDS, and a lot of them are marking this evening in some way – it’s easy for me to imagine what they might be doing tonight.

For starters: the other side of the world – in Hong Kong, the elegant young woman who runs AIDS Concern will be directing various helpers in a smallish, polite, but well-organized event, among steam trays of dim sum. Young Dr. Chan will make a brief speech, then smile hello to some of his patients. Later, young men in short-sleeved rayon or cotton will escape the clattering of caterers’ pans to dance the night away at loud fundraisers in Zip, then the Powerhouse, until they disband into taxis scattered along the steep hills of Central.

In Sydney, a colorful crowd surging through Oxford Street is creating an impromptu street festival. Most are wearing red ribbons – some as tattoos on their biceps – and dropping money into baskets held by drag queens, each competing to make more money for the AIDS clinics. Summer is starting to peak, and brawny, sweaty guys with their arms around each other are shrieking with laughter at Pam Ann, who, dressed as a stewardess and standing on an outdoor stage, throws condoms at the crowd while maintaining a stream of insults in her rambunctious Ozzie accent. At dawn there will be couples of all sorts staggering home to take Panadol, then drag themselves in to work.

Crossing the Pacific, in Los Angeles, a benefit with this year’s crop of Hollywood names takes place at the dazzlingly postmodern Bonaventure Hotel. Michael Kearns will probably speak, exhorting the acting community to stay involved, and everyone will network, smiling, wearing red ribbons and watching to see if they can get into camera range. Down in West Hollywood, my friend Terry, her fashionably cut hair dyed a color I may not have seen yet, could be herding her HIV writing group through a poetry reading at the glass-and-steel Gay & Lesbian Center, or maybe this year she is performing in a radical-political cabaret with other riot grrrls at a lesbian club.

Trisha, in Phoenix, may be performing one of her surreal stage works, with political overtones that refer to people with HIV, illegal immigrants, and the Iraqi war, all at the same time. She has a small but serious audience of students from the local university, the men with long hair and glasses, the women in jean skirts. Joining her on stage are her ex-girlfriend and her dog, both of which are trained to help her in the tangled, symbolic ending.

If we fly to New York, the big professional AIDS organizations are holding benefits in Victorian hotel lobbies and in bare white galleries; women in gray power suits, Armani-suited lawyers and city politicians are joined by some scruffily dressed activists and artists. But most of the activists are down in Chelsea at an ACT-UP demonstration, posters and chants at attention, striding past bored, patient policemen who have watched this every December for what seems to them like decades.

Further south, in the suburbs of Washington, my mother is watching television. She will probably see some news show, or perhaps a public television documentary, that talks about World AIDS Day. She won’t say anything about it, but in a day or two my eldest sister will send me an e-mail: hey, Mom hasn’t heard from you in weeks, you’d better give her a call. And how are you doing, anyway?

Berlin: the president of the German AIDS Foundation is introducing pop stars at their big yearly benefit at the Komische Oper. Down in the Kleiststraße, Heinz spends the time until the late leather crowd starts to come into the bar filling a rack with postcards of handsome, shirtless men, pictured smiling and saying, Safer Is Better! In Sitges, in Rome, in Gran Canaria, the bars pause the music for a brief remembrance in the tiled courtyards.

In Cape Town, the earnest, charming Mandisa is on a platform, restlessly moving back and forth as she exhorts a gathering of students, children of a generation of apartheid activists, to focus their political efforts onto getting medications for their country. Her fellow activist Henry, who is looking a bit thin these days, will be talking to a group in his native Uganda, emphatically handing out condoms, especially to the young men who are hanging out in groups, snickering and looking at the girls.

In the great city of London, an apparently endless network of events in churches, shops and nightclubs is building up to Friday night’s Red Ribbon Ball, where AIDS activists of all stripes will come to dance and decompress after so much work. Carl, who hardly ever stops taking charge, is still working though, managing the volunteer booth and making sure everything happens on schedule – until he finally gets out onto the floor to dance the night away.

And I think of other friends, scattered far from the big cities: among the small beach towns of eastern Florida, people from Ma Jaya Bhagavati’s ashram have been cooking for days to prepare their trips around hospitals up and down the coast. Ma herself, brash, cheerful, and so beloved by the patients who see her each month, will talk to every one, swooping in and out of hospital rooms while bringing them cakes and biscuits, creating a chaos that the nurses have learned to fit into their schedules.

Meanwhile my friend Jay, in his small house in the dry California mountains, doesn’t go out much these days, because side effects from his medications make him shy of being seen by people. Tonight he is at home with his dog, perhaps lighting a fire against the cool night air, and working on his historical novel, adding to the rows of binders on shelves along the wall.

A few hundred miles north, in my beloved San Francisco, there’s a certain calm, as there has been for some years – as though a great storm has passed over. Because in San Francisco, many of the dead are long dead, and most of the living are taking their pills, going to the gym, and planning to be around for a while.

Among the small hilly streets and gingerbread houses dotted around the Castro, someone is complaining, don’t take that candle, it’s an expensive one – and further down the street it’s – you’re not going to wear that, are you?

But finally, at the last minute, or a little later, they’re grabbing jackets, clattering down the stairs and out the door into the chilly Pacific night, to join, halfway along its length, a vast wave of people carrying candles, walking up and down the little hills along a darkened Market Street, all transformed into a great quilt of tiny lights as they reach the monuments of the Civic Center.

It is a quilt, really. Like the AIDS Quilt, but not quite like it – not a memorial, but a living network of people who remember, people who may be worried or frightened, people who are calm, or happy that their medicines are working, people who have lost someone, or who have learned to go on…

And, like the other quilt, every panel is beautiful.

Thank you.

Temptations

Dinner with P– on Friday – tapas and two (!) pitchers of sangria.

That's not as dramatic as it sounds – this sangria wasn't very strong; normally one good glass of sangria can have me giggling and inept, but I suspect this was only the wine, juice and fruit, with no brandy slipped into it. Ah well, it was the tapas restaurant near the river, which has a fine and stylish outside location, but rather second-rate food. I've also noticed that none of the waiters seem to be from Spain – although, when I asked whether our friendly, pleasant-looking, wide-mouthed waiter was Italian (as so many of the restaurant's employees are), he was annoyed with me. He tangled me in a guessing game in which I did very badly – "I'm from the only place between two continents" – I thought Malta? or maybe something Baltic, or somewhere in the tangle of Oceanic islands? No, he meant Istanbul – which, for some reason, he called Constantinople. I felt a bit silly – of course, the Turks like to point out that their country, and capital, are split between Europe and Asia. Come to think of it, I should have talked to him more about being Greek – why else would someone from Istanbul say he was from Constantinople, unless he was of Greek parentage?

Oh, and: the whole also heavily colored by the hot day, pleasurably moving into a light evening, outside near the river; and I've just had a haircut (very short), and am wearing pirates (those Spanish short jeans - yo ho ho) and sneakers, and generally feeling light, cheerful, young. Ish.

But enough context. That's not what this entry is about. At some point the conversation turned to upcoming travel, vacations, Spain, Barcelona Sitges. I started telling P– about my plan for a few August days visiting Susan and Rob during their annual August-in-Sitges vacation. Ended up waxing very lyrical – and trying to be very convincing: as P– has never been in Spain, I thought he would enjoy Sitges a lot – especially because it has such a strong context of relaxed, self-respecting, cheerful sensuality, which I think P– could afford to experience more in his life. Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In my attempt to convince, I started to catalogue the beauties of Barcelona and Sitges: the dramatic, stylish beauty – someone once said that, although it's a much smaller city, Barcelona could give Paris a run for its money. The fun and warmth of it all: I– always tells me that I should visit Madrid, because it's much livelier – by Spanish standards, Barcelona is considered haughty and cold – but let's face it, that's in a Spanish context. Compared to northern England (heck, compared to anywhere in northern Europe, or North America for that matter, including Mexico), practically anywhere in Spain is livelier and more fun.

I can prove it's more fun – on my first visit to Sitges, which came after I had spent a lot more time in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, there came a night when, at about 4 am, we were arguing over which wine to drink with dinner. In a café, about twenty yards from the ocean. And I thought: wow... this is lots more fun than Basel. And I also thought: what a shame I didn't specialize in Spanish music....

I told him how dramatic and stylish the local gay communities are; how fun, how really enjoyable (as opposed to the rather beer-soaked, shabby approach in provincial Britain, but I didn't say that of course). The casual beach life, the sunny streets... there are so many beauties, so many temptations, to the whole experience. And last year, for the first time, I stayed in Sitges and visited Barcelona, rather than the reverse, and discovered that it was just as much fun, and vastly more relaxing.

Well, the upshot was: I talked myself into it. If there was any question about whether I was going to go myself, it's been decided.

As for P–, who knows?...

¡Scorchio!

Evening: baked earth giving heat back to the sky....

I keep thinking of my relationship to heat, to summer and sun; linked of course with my usual wondering about my relationship with productivity, with writing, with aging, with feeling well, with being happy, with the many other versions of my life I can imagine, and the other places I can imagine experiencing them. And even linked with my skin and hair, which are better because of the heat, or perhaps are not.

Somewhere between relaxation and exhaustion, between well-being and debility...

***

later at night: when really cool breezes start floating in the windows. I'd love to get acclimatized to the hotter life, and figure out how to live in it....

Think about other, remembered, heats: since I don't have a particularly good memory, this won't be every one of forty-nine summers. (Hmm, After Forty-Nine Summers Dies the Swan – no, not a very good title, except perhaps for a rather unsuccessful crime novel.) One: Los Angeles, early 1990s; when I wrote several sad, rather aimless pieces; the scratchy tweed couch in the summer sunshine, all suffused with too much lying around in my bathrobe, having finally finished my master's thesis, wondering whether I was going to die soon or should start on my PhD dissertation, wondering if I should move back to San Francisco, wondering if I should.

Another: the August week in Crete, I was really and truly not well: I went virtually for a respite, and Kunsu and Gerhard took such great care of me. Was that really just last summer?

Barcelona, a dazzling sense of endless folding shuttered doors designed for the heat. Gran Canaria, a week baking in the sun.

As for here in northern England, although I've lived here nearly four years now, I don't have strongly charged memories of what summer feels like. Much of that is probably because we rarely have such powerful heat – but there is also the strangeness of the past two (was it two? again, memory blurs) summers, where, because I was ill for different reasons (thyroid leading to endless sleep, that was the most recent), I didn't really experience the summer except as a time when nobody bothered me....

Can the cheap thermometer in my alarm clock really be right? Is it really almost 80° in my bedroom? That is either wonderful or annoying... and it's too hot to really care which it is....