in the hall of mirrors

Writing and hearing

Working on a presentation about Derek Jarman's last films, for Wednesday. After much procrastination, aided by the calm, dull backwaters of the Easter holiday. 

And, amid brief frustrations as to exact dates, processes unrecorded, I realize I am enjoying myself: while making dinner in the kitchen, I say aloud to no one: But this is fun.

Strange, too, because my work on AIDS artworks often seems exhaustingly sad; but once I break through the resistance to the dark past, there is such vivid life in the emotions, in the art works. And probably the innate pleasure of making, which I forget most days.

But now I must also get ready for tomorrow morning's lecture; since I already know what I need to talk about, this consists of just re-hearing my class CD of examples. And I discover that they are, also, enjoyable (especially Jody Diamond's In That Bright World for voices and gamelan, always a huge favorite of mine; but they all seem interesting).

Which suggests that my boredom with my own work, my resistance to starting, has nothing to do with the pleasure of actually doing it...

Ah, the complexes and irrational patterns of one's own weaknesses.

... among artists

I am too sleepy to write much, or entirely coherently, after a long bath, bath oils, relaxed. Until the water is not very hot.

Gerhard has been here for three days, then two days more, working on the book about him and his work. And Kunsu's work floats around with it of course, his ideas and pictures, the words and pictures of various artists he works with, the projects, the artists, the dancers.

Gerhard's talk on Wednesday was the third in a row of composers – the other two our own people, Bennett, Agustín, both so varied, so intimate in their work and intentions. Tonight Gerhard and I, after working through all of these plans and texts, watched Fellini's Satyricon, which I love, and which he hasn't seen for many years – he seemed pleased, dreamy himself afterwards, as though he is happy to fall asleep with those arcane, bizarre images and stolen fragments of lovely music (especially the Mimaroglu bits of course).

Last night was the poetry slam at Pink Lane – I won, I won! – with the story Reitalianization, which is in this blog – and then gave the money back to the people running it (£30) because I have a job, and maybe they can use it to buy a good microphone. And they're all young and poorer than me anyway, it would be silly to take their money.

Other poets and writers on last night ranged from the first two – both talented and smart in very different ways, but so shy and uncertain they fled the stage after two poems each – to the skillful final three, the intelligent, assured poet with several fine pastiches, the black girl who had started doing remarkable parodies in various voices. The dark-haired youngster with green fingernails, the very rough sad one with blond hair and a scab on his arm. Not to mention the smart dark-haired student in a long coat, who will be skilled when he is older, who probably writes endlessly.

Gerhard's compositions are so free, so varied – it is rather fun to re-view this book, which has been a painful chore of Musicology, as a looser collection of articles, some academic, some personal, some artistic. Many photographs, many fascinatingly wrought pictures. The publisher will evidently indulge us in a volume that have good German paper and binding, with experimental formats whenever we want them.

Matthew, one of our graduate students in composition – but not for much longer I think, I believe he has handed in his doctoral work – has decided to set some of my writings to music, and sent me another e-mail today about his ideas. He took some of my pieces apart, one whole poem, other fragments, paragraphs: really lovely, I gave him my blessing to do whatever he wanted with them. The intent is that I may also sing them (if they aren't too difficult for my aging voice, nothing above, say, a high F-sharp, please).

That would be the first time someone has set one of my texts to music. I can even imagine publishing my short prose pieces and poems – there aren't a huge mass of them, and they probably won't grow, as I haven't had any ideas for a while, but – that's all right, some of them really were quite good; it would be nice to put the best of them together and bind them. And perhaps Dalkey will publish the Butor translation I sent them last month.

In the bath I have just read Roberto Bolaño's 'Sensini', the first story in Last Evenings on Earth, which is about two writers – an older and a younger – who write letters to each other about literary competitions, never meet, win a few prizes. A lovely story; about the scattered and unpredictable nature of artists, of makers. And, subtly but pleasantly, at the end of the story he mentions that the story won a prize in a literary competition....

Things that are easy

After months of moving from anger to exasperation, through guilt and a sense that I was holding out on him too long (and thereby being petty, etc.), I finally texted Patrick tonight, and we Moved On, which took a total of four text messages.

So utterly easy, as it always is in these things once you actually do them.

I phoned Mary Jo in New York to ask her about the tableaux at the end of Elizabeth tragedies, thinking they were a standard staging trope that would probably explain the tableau of gay activists at the end of Jarman's Edward II. It was instantly fun to talk – but we discussed another friend I've been ignoring for several years, not because I'm angry at him but because I simply can't relate to him any more. He has plenty of money, hasn't worked since 1983, works out at the gym and goes to big gay parties... she sympathized, as she feels sort of the same way (as she said, she and I have always lived "purpose-driven lives" – there are things we really want to do – so it's harder and harder to talk to people who don't, especially as we all get older and less flexible about these things).

But, having talked to Patrick, I'm thinking that a simple, friendly note – on the order of a Christmas card, as anyone would write to someone who was a friend long ago, even if they don't seem to matter much now – would be easy enough; and would still my milld guilt....

***

I am still (a) getting work done on the book, but (b) wasting far more time than I'm actually using. Of course (a) is far better than everything has been, for years, but (b) is still fairly ludicrous.

And all this making of sentences! They are so awful! – at least at first – at least often – at least in my doubts. Every sentence, often each phrase, is a battle with the obvious, the hackneyed, the unclear, the cumbersome... the nonsensical. A world of snaking subordinate clauses, overlong chains of adjectives, the whole oscillating between the shabby grays of scholarly prose and the shrill, clashing oranges and greens of journalistic crap.

No: I know it's not really that bad. It just feels that way, at moments.

Yesterday, I gave my current notes and drafts - about thirty pages, single-spaced and with shrunken margins to save paper – to Melinda, my therapist. She was pleased, saying – rightly – that there is more of a sense that this book actually is coming into existence, that it is becoming real. (Or Real, like the velveteen rabbit.)

I feel the book and its ideas rising around me, like dream buildings... which reminds me of this unrhymed sonnet.

But watching and hearing these things is in itself a difficult kind of work. It's like being possessed, by the spirits of these songs, books, films – by the spirits of their makers...

Transitionals

The unhappy weight of guilt around productivity has let up somewhat: since Mitchell has kindly started giving me my marching orders – literally telling me what chapter to draft next, and send it to him – and Melinda, going a bit outside the normal range of activity for a therapist, has chimed in asking for the same – I am getting some work done, and can remember once again how everyday, how easy, it really is to do what I think I am supposed to do, with my life.

So, when I lost the past four days to, first, a cluster of things to do for other people – a report on a doctoral thesis, a recommendation letter, a chain of minor administrative discussions; culminating with M.'s slightly anxiety-producing discussion with me of what he wants me to take over in the fall, which is definitely more than I wanted to take on – and then a big system crash and rebuild (two and a half days, basically) plus erratic stomach problems – it was all annoying but not depressing, not terrible, not merely Another Example Of What A Failure I Inevitably Am. As it usually is.

Although last night I looked through the supposedly drafted chapter, amazed that it was really just notes: and realized I needed to get up today and write out paragraphs, so that I would have something to send to Mitchell and Melinda on Tuesday.

In the night, this evolved into its own kind of panic – a dream of wandering through my neighborhood, then a few blocks away to an area I'd never seen before, with beautiful houses, sandy earth, and warm, dusty weather, where I discovered various castoffs and started to take them away. (Is that what scholarship looks like to my inner selves? – well, I admit, as today I need to go through a pile of secondary sources looking for the necessary points where somebody has talked about my current topics, it's not an inappropriate image.) And then, as I climbed a stair behind a house to another level, the dream turned dark and hopeless, as the things I'd collected were lost, and I was in a scruffy wasteland of urban trash.

Just a dream: but I woke aware that I was frightened of the possibilities of failure, yet again.

So: coffee, and attacking paragraphs, and cranking out – something. Some attempt to avoid, to hold back, to overcome, disaster.

•••

In two days, to Stuttgart for a week that includes Easter weekend, to work with Joyce on another long-delayed anthology. Stuttgart is, I think, the German version of Norwich – a rather isolated, boring town, pretty and well-off, but with a population that most of its compatriots treat as slightly ridiculous. I remember from visiting there in the early 1990s, an exquisite toy-like train system – a result of a highly technical town (home to Mercedes and BMW), lots of municipal funds, and a relatively small area and small population. Cute, to be frank.

Probably a good place to get some work done....

Wind, rising

Here in northeastern England, a few miles from the North Sea, the winds of March – and of course of a number of other months, depending – can go on for days, even for weeks... at night gusts constantly tear at the chimney, and the faintly white clouds of the night sky, broken by a few dark patches, move past the window like an interminable avant-garde student film.

Continuing to worry about the long, free days of my research leave, during which, for the most part, I have nothing to do but write: ideal, almost – or they would be, if I weren't so inert, so hypnotized, so neurotically, insanely wasteful of this precious time. The only useful work I've done has been at Mitchell's behest: I begged him to help me with my procrastination, and lo! a casual command from his office in Los Angeles, and two days later I'd written a book proposal. Now, in a midnight phone call, he proclaims: bring me the head of John the Bap- – uh, no, bring me a draft of the chapter on film scores; in a week.

My initial reaction: it can't be done, not that chapter, I don't know what I'm talking about, it's too sketchy/improbable/chaotic. Then I start to get into it, list what I know and want to say: and, shortly after midnight, two pages of notes spring forth, groups of ideas and films and things that need to be said; there is probably a lot on this topic I don't know, but I won't worry about that. A pile of references from my four-and-a-half shelves of books devoted to AIDS, a bath, and bed by two a.m....

But now I'm slightly in trouble: my mind is moving so fast, working on this topic that I thought would be so opaque, that I realize I can't sleep: that, like the sky, my mind is being pushed by constantly shifting gusts of energy, of thoughts. The I Ching gives me 51, shock, thunder: images of vast dramatic change, a good if alarming stormy hexagram. But I really have to sleep, so a beta blocker (I've kept a bottle of propanolol around for years, ever since I first took them in 1997, just before my anxious overseas move to Hong Kong; as the mildest of anti-anxieties, they are useful from time to time) plus this blog entry, and now at four a.m. I should manage to get some rest.

Such a strange feeling: if the hypnotized emptiness of the weeks of my procrastinating, not-writing existence doesn't make any sense, this is its opposite that suddenly shows why that emptiness occurs – energetic work, even when it is not difficult, can have its own quality of vertigo, of change, of shock: of being torn apart, by stormy March winds....

Density

With Strauss' Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last.

Coward used to complain that critics called his work 'thin' – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism – the sentimentality of predictable emotions, worked out step by step without any huge surprises; and the long stretches based on only one or two ideas. It's sort of a problem in information theory: how much information, how many packages of 'real' data, are packed into each sentence? At least, that's a definition of artistic density for the computer age.

And so, low-density musics? – well, I suppose: minimalism that no longer has the excitement it did ten years ago (I played Geoff Smith's Fifteen Wild Decembers the other day, and was left wondering – why did I love this when it first came out? – not that it's bad; but now it seems, well, rather thin). Even some of the Darmstadt music I heard this semester while teaching it seemed relatively faint, almost the simple working-out of a concept – many events don't necessarily make for density.

On the other hand, high-density writing: like the short story I just read by M. John Harrison, 'Seven Guesses of the Heart' from his Things that Never Happen – I picked it out as the shortest story in the book, as something to read between doing other things; and was startled, brought up short, at the huge and complex feelings, meanings, sentences he put together. A short story with easily enough resonance for a novel: and most writers would have spun it out into one....

Sitges X

Words

Hmm. Over 6,000 words in the past ten posts, since coming to Sitges on vacation.

That's the equivalent, or nearly, of an academic article... okay let's say one a bit on the short side, 7,000 is perhaps more normal.

And only about 300 words of musicology written in that time.

Now I know that I am given to laziness and avoidance; and I know that blogging is considerably easier than musicology (I don't need a distinct topic, I don't need to organize arguments, I can just rattle on about whatever comes to mind). But this makes me feel – well, both pleased (oh look how easy) and displeased (oh look how misguided) – as though this outlines the difference between, say, reading difficult prose and watching television.

What shall I do?... it is an interesting question, at least to me. I know that, to some extent, all writing tends to feed Writing – the action, the energy, the process, grows, as there is more of it, of whatever kind. But how, how to fix myself to the various, and increasingly desperate, tasks at hand?...

A bit like Pessoa, in his various personas: rattling, wandering, maundering, on and on about the day and the people and his boring work as an an accountant; and somewhere on the way somehow managing to write poems, books....

It is, as a certain king says in a certain show, a puzzlement.

•••

Wanting to talk

Dinner – an unexpectedly cheerful, even fairly rambunctious dinner (I hope we can go back there – Rob didn't get in trouble, God only knows why, for lighting the candles by using one of those paper chopstick holders – on fire of course).

Fun, but... afterward, feeling a bit diffuse, a bit complex, a bit like getting over something, a bit like... talking. All a bit amplified by listening to some rather existential pop songs, sch as Barenaked Ladies' 'Pinch Me' ("On an evening such as this / It's hard to tell if I exist") or, very differently, the Eurhythmics' regretful 'Seventeen' ("We should have jumped out of that airplane after all"). In such a mood, I should perhaps avoid playing Porcupine Tree's 'Sound of Muzak' (very Adornoesque).

At least two friends' images appeared in my mind: I could call them – their time, it is midafternoon – but it might be a bit crazy, on a mobile from a beach in Spain. No emergencies, just... wanting to talk. To try out a few complaints and theories and ideas and defenses on someone, to have someone cluck in sympathy, and afterward to think, Ah now I feel better.

Such an important process: another reason to have a solid, centered social/home life....

•••

Saved

An hour or two of being indecisive, out of sorts, again, still: how ridiculous, you will say – I'm on vacation, in a town where there are so many things to do, why don't I just go do one of them?

And my mood, and decisions, are saved: a thunderstorm, torrential rain. I think of a time now ten years ago, when I first moved to Hong Kong, younger and more confused and more excited: and stood naked out on a balcony in the tropical rain...

which impels me to give you the article I wrote that ends on that balcony, which was published in a California gay magazine. Enjoy. Meanwhile, I shall go stand in the rain.

Wrong mountain

David Hirson has written two plays – and only two: La Bête (1991), an extraordinarily peculiar tour de force in rhyming verse that actually reached Broadway before flopping and is often done by the braver regional theaters, and Wrong Mountain (2000), a bitter but brilliant piece on devoting your life to the wrong goals (i.e. climbing the wrong mountain).

There must be a story there, though an Internet search doesn't give me clarification, only more mysteries: a young playwright, no longer really young; two brilliant but extremely bizarre plays that got a lot of attention, if not quite what you would call success, and were published together; and nothing else. He apparently shows up at festivals and such, and you can't help thinking – how peculiar does he seem there, how does he justify having just a play a decade? Is there going to be a third play in his career – around 2009, at this rate? Will it be brilliant, will it be a success, or another complicated tangle of success and failure? Does he do any minor plays at all, does he ever sketch anything, or does he burn everything peripheral before anyone sees it?

Of course it's plausible, given the monumental nature of each of the plays, for him to take that long writing each of them – it just seems so bizarre that each is so huge, so ambiguous in its relation to the current American stage; you would think they would be either simply failures by an obscurity, or near-successes by someone who has written other things that didn't do even that well. Because both plays are also sort of about bad art, about people who devote their lives to the artistic and either fail or do something worthless with it, the resonance is especially disturbing.

***

As I try to work my way through the presentation I must give next week, which is embedded in the subject matter of the book I am promising to write during my 2008 research leave, I find more and more things wrong with it, things that just don't link up, or make the sense I had formerly asserted, or really seem to matter at all. And, in the middle of the night, as I get more and more stressed, I am wakeful because I can't help thinking that the planned book, itself, might be – before it is ever written – a load of nonsense, a pointless exercise. That it is not a book I can make sense of, not a book I can do well – nor a book anyone would really want, even if it could be done well.

Wrong mountain: the idea that you would spend enormous effort and all your ability to make something, and it would be forgotten, not because the world is unfair and people are unkind and you aren't properly appreciated, but simply because the thing itself is junk.

And if you know that a difficult piece of work is not going to be worth doing – and know, not merely in the context of the usual insecurities of the writer, but because you realize how essentially unimportant the shards of your life are, to other people, and even to yourself – how can you possibly make yourself actually do it – actually scale the side of that mountain?...

Of course I have spent most of my life driving myself to make some kind of book, and of course have long realized that such drive, such obsession, is no guarantee that anything larger I might finally, someday, finish would be any kind of success. But thinking it through this way: to do your best, and realize that it isn't really very good: this is something we can easily imagine happening to other people, even to most other people, given human limitations; but to experience it happening to oneself – especially in the face of all that has been given up, all that has not happened in the place of this thing, that is not in itself particularly good – this is so huge, so appalling in its entirely plausible and ironic finality, that it is almost impossible, emotionally, to compass....

Borges: Blogger

It's going better now; several hours of successful work last night, the end is in sight.

Some blogs keep returning to the subject of blogging as though they need to justify it: I have certainly spent time trying to get it exactly right, but justifying it seems unnecessary – why should any kind of writing, communicating, articulating, artistry, artisanship, need justifying?

In the interstices of working and not-working, I pick up the Borges Selected Non-Fictions. Borges was clearly a blogger – brief, fascinating pieces on a variety of topics, each of which defines a world. (It's actually amazing that his substantial reputation is based, on the most part, on such short pieces of writing.) There is a 1934 piece, 'I, A Jew', where he responds to a Fascist news sheet that claimed that he was Jewish – he says he wishes he was; the piece is brief, poetic, speculative, fun, and would make an ideal blog entry.

Hesse wrote critically against 'feuilletonistes', against the tendency for newspapers to fragment into little bits of prose; but I think he was wrong or, at least, as Adorno was about popular culture, ultimately unfair. Feuilletons have their own place in writing, and certainly in newspapers. Brief, personalized fragments of writing are valuable. Speculative tours-de-force are wonderful.

Blogging is good....

Aaargh

Almost nothing done for nearly thirty-six hours. Puttering, cooking, washing dishes; walking around the books on the floor... as far too often I am working against myself and what I need to do, in the most strenuous manner... ridiculous.

Master of the dilatory, consummate connoisseur of avoidance, lord of laziness, powerful proponent of procrastination....

Aaaaaaaargh.