Me and Mr. Jones

Inside jokes become more or less interesting depending upon how many people are in on them. I am unsure which way is which. Most of my jokes exist between me, myself, and Tony. And the few others I have with real people I’ve already told to everyone else I know so really they are no longer “inside” at all.

But that’s how it goes. And this brings us to Mommy.

Mommy owns many kitties. If I had to guess I would say somewhere around 8 or 9, but if you were to guess 200 that would probably be right also. Mommy is a crazy cat lady if ever there was a lady who went (or was) crazy and lived with a hell of a lot of cats.

Mommy has named her feline friends completely random things like “The Pickle.” And, as you would expect, because she also talks to herself and about herself, she can now be found saying things like “Mommy has to pet the pickle!” I swear, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried…

She explained all of this on the phone to me the other night. Mommy and I are good friends and talk as much as we can. Most of the time our conversations have to do with our own neoroses and disorders, depressions and desires. And other times it is simply to laugh (with love) at the funny things we find ourselves doing. Laughing at myself accounts for the bulk of my entertainment outside of drinking.

And I’ve been drinking a lot. Not by some people’s standards, but probably by most other people’s. The only thing I find concerning about this is the fact that it was one of my New Year’s resolutions that I thought I had a good chance of keeping. And from that statement alone (you “close readers” you) you can probably tell that I am not currently keeping any of my resolutions.

Yes, yes, I KNOW this is typical, not just of me but of everybody, but that doesn’t mean it is satisfactory. It is time to lay my life bare and begin again.

Like an inside joke among friends, I tell you now so that you may share in my small victories. Or maybe judge me in my failures. The box is still filled, the bottles still emptied, and my indulgences are still being satisfied.

So Tony has agreed to tie me up and tie me down until I am able to meet some of these goals. Keep you posted.

I realized yesterday that I am not completely honest, and this is why I love my blog.

Posting upon Tony, or any blog, is a performance. It is, of course, enhanced when you use a surrogate persona and/or pseudonym to write, which I do, but it would be still if I did not. It is exposing some piece of you in hopes of attracting others. Like a midrift t-shirt or a personals ad. But it is contrived.

At least in my case, I pretend to divulge my most intimate self, or that self’s memories. However, as I re-read these writings, I realize that I don’t ever really go Full Monty. I leave out things, like the present, because I don’t want to become vulnerable to attack.

This train of thought actually began as I considered keeping an actual, private, journal. I have attempted such things before and always failed because my true desire is to be exposed and not hidden away in a personally bound book. And the times I have written in a journal I have always imagined someone reading what I write and therefore I’ve written it in a particular way. It seems the gesture isn’t worthwhile for me if it doesn’t bring some outside gratification.

Hence the blog. And the natural delight in typing things for public consumption. And yet, the blog is limited by the need to make things interesting and not personally dangerous to myself. Hence Tony.

This is quite the catch-22 because I really really want to discover my authentic self, but I want to be read as well. What to do?

I just wanted to relay an interesting quote from Christopher and His Kind. It is Christopher talking about his excitement over meeting E. M. Forster, saying the exact same things that I would say about Christopher himself:

“Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people’s books he found examples of style which he waned to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. The Zem masters of archery–of whom, in those days, Christopher had never heard–start by teaching you the mental attitude with which you must pick up the bow. A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up a pen.”

The quote appears on p. 105 of my edition of the book. And, for my own sake, it is interesting to note that I have never completed an E. M. Forster novel. His overtly “gay” novel, Maurice, was recommended to me by a boy named Jesse when I was a freshman in college. Jesse tried hard to seduce me, and he succeeded in all but the physical sense.

I read the first 100 pages of Maurice before self-righteously discarding it. It seemed to me that Forster was still so uncomfortable with his sexuality that the only thing he could do was go all Platonic in his discussions of the pure and academic love between two men. Never once did his characters simply delight in their sexual release. Which, at the time of my reading, was basically ALL that I cared about.

I am happy to say that Isherwood does not suffer from this problem.

After my day of excited preparations for the Book Club, I needed a distraction. As I mentioned the other day, I recently finished The Berlin Stories, and was preparing for two other Isherwood novels. The first, Christopher and His Kind, had not yet been delivered by the online bookstore, so I picked up The Single Man in its stead. I only read 25 pages, and I look forward to reading them again soon. Isherwood has an amazing ability to portray a person’s thinking life. His description of a broken-hearted 58 year-old gay man who was trying to deal with the death of his long-term partner completely stopped me in my tracks. Here was depression in its perfectly written form. Here was emptiness and loss.

However, we’ll get back to that in a couple weeks when I do. Because, as it turns out, later that evening my other book had arrived and I couldn’t wait to begin.

Christopher and His Kind is the autobiographical account of Isherwood’s life in Berlin during the 1930s. Many stories from this period were fictionally adapted into what became Goodbye to Berlin, and now they were being explicated, analyzed, and confessed for what they really were: the coming-of-age of a brilliant gay writer. I say “gay” writer because it appears that Isherwood feels this to be (as I would) a very important distinction and catalyst for his experiences.

In the first 50 pages I have already met several of the main characters from Goodbye, and heard the erotic details I had hoped would actually exist. However, what is currently fascinating me about this book is Isherwood’s own dealing with himself. He writes in both the first and third person about himself. One lame-ass reviewer from Amazon.com saw this as a negative. I, on the other hand, am taking great inspiration from the conceit. Older Isherwood sees his youngers self as a character to be explored and flushed out with his words. It is a separate character from that other “Christopher Isherwood” who appeared in Goodby to Berlin, but not a mutually exclusive one. His injection of self into his work, and his later separation and exploration of that self is precisely what I wish I had the skill, dedication, and ability to do in my own work.

And besides, his sexuality is as much of a muse as my own is for me, but he manages to maintains the distance and perspective to make it meaningful to others. It just seems that most of my image of what my contributions as a writer could be is now somewhat obsolete as Isherwood has accomplished these things with such great panache.

And another thing: how come writers always manage to find and befriend other great writers? So far in this book Christopher is best friends with W. H. Auden, has hung out with Andre Gide, and lived with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at his Sex Institute. Not fair, I say, not fair at all.

That’s right, even Tony loves Oprah.

And if moving to the city where she works and hitting on Stedman every chance he gets wasn’t enough, now he is starting his own book club. And he is personally inviting you to join in the fun!

All you have to do is e-mail him directly if you know his e-mail, or post your intentions in the comment section below. Then we will all read and write about our selected book (if we feel so inclined). No big timelines, no guiding questions, no real pressure. (Unless of course you want them). The basic premise behind this is simple, Tony believes that every activity one can gain pleasure from alone will be better in a group. (Or rather, that was his belief about masturbation and he’s recycling it here.)

And so, without further ado…Here’s Tony’s first bookclub selection: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany.

This is the description from the back of the book:

“Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece about the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and a story that foresaw the World Wide Web. Originally published in 1984, its central issues–technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism–have only become more pressing with the passage of time.

The novel’s topic is information itself. What are the repercussions of the discovery, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other’s perfect erotic object out to ‘point nine-nine-nine and sevearl nines percent more’? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, and to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by ‘cultural fugue,’ and the other is–you!”

Welcome home.

It took me a long while to actually sit down and read it, but I am so thankful that I did.

Isherwood’s classic tale from Germany’s Weimar period in the 1930s touches me everywhere I like to be touched. It was loosely (yet intelligently) structured, simply (yet deliciously) written, and engaged both my fictional fantasies and political sympathies.

Where I expected to read sordid tales of bohemian degradation, instead I found colorfully belieavable characters in a world becoming something other than they imagined. The Nazi shadow that slowly enveloped these stories was much more powerful to me than any propagandistic piece. Isherwood’s dispassionate reporting made all of the episodic incidents blend together in the way that August Sander’s whole portfolio seems to be the complete picture of truth.

But what is most interesting to me is the way that he is so intimately involved despite his lack of acting upon the plot. Writing himself into the tales, yet never attempting to glorify his role, was brilliant.

I have ordered and am anxiously awaiting the delivery of his actual memoirs from his time in Germany. I can’t wait to compare the “fiction” versus the “reality” of his experiences.

Even if I suspected it before, Isherwood is now officially my literary sugar-daddy.

I love to dream.

Often my nightvisions (which, let’s be honest, happen during afternoon naps mostly) involve the exact same thing that I am doing during waketime. But then there’s the other times. Two nights ago I was parachuting into North Korea. Just now I was in Germany, hanging out in a flat with my cousin Melissa, her mother Cheryl, and my friend Tuta. And some older German fellow I assumed was sleeping with Tuta.

There was a dog, black, and large windows that allowed us to see the house next door. Most of the dream was spent commenting on the conspicuous older man who lived there and drove fancy cars (which looked like a cross between a Cadillac and the Pope-mobile) very quickly down his steep driveway. Tuta worked on her blog, which had a looped Bugs Bunny cartoon playing in the background. On the television was some commercial which featured an old jingle popular during the time of the Olympics in some other country. (Or so Tuta and her man said over and over) I think I remember my cousin Josh entering the scene and discussing his all-night partying and rabble-rousing. I passed from room to room and somehow tripped over the dog every time. The neighbor and his car was constantly visible from the window.

There are hints of real-live wake relationships between some of my dream’s images and how they played out. I delight in how vividly all the details remain with me. And how, because I fell asleep listening to the original cast recording of Cabaret, it all makes some sordid sense.

As for the earlier dream of North Korea, well, I have no idea. I only know that I was in danger of missing the flight and was admonished by the army captain aboard before I leapt from 50,000 feet.

The thing I love about dreams are their inner-logic and simultaneous surreality. I’m happy that these weren’t as disturbing as some of my past dreams, and yet they are perfectly odd enough to entertain me long after I have woken up.

People, like coffee, are complicated. I spend too much time sipping both.

The past week has found me many opportunities to meet folks who I used to know. And to learn about what they’ve been up to since I stopped knowing them. And it seems to vary based only on when I knew them. If they went to highschool with me then they live within 30 miles of their parents, finished college but not much more, and are either married or parenting illegitimate children.

However, if they were from college then they live on one of the coasts, dress relatively sharply, and have at least two very interesting stories to tell you over drinks.

The problem with this is that I’m not so sure that these impressions reflect the truth of the matter. It seems that they have a lot more to do with me and my measures of success. Meaning that I am happy to know that my formative-year friends have achieved less success than I estimate that I have because at the time I felt so insecure and clueless. However, once I arrived in college I was a bit more directed and so it is easier for me to allow those individual to remain interesting in their current lives. And to introduce myself in my current costume.

But what I would really be interested to know is how I am perceived by these people. Will F talk to R (whom I ran into at Bob Evans) and be as pleased to know that I’m a librarian living with my boyfriend in Chicago as I am to hear that he’s a fat father living in Terre Haute? For me it is total spite and revenge that gives me pleasure to know that my unrequited lover in high school is no longer attractive to me. Do I now officially fit his image of a faggot or fruit who he stopped talking to once he realized I was gay? Does it bring him pleasure or revulsion? Or, worst case scenario, does he simply not care at all?

Either way, it was nice to see all of my friends again. It is good to know that history evolves and exists. And, in many cases, it is good to imagine that history again becoming my present. Picking up where I left off with those wonderful gems from college who inspired me then and are doing so again.

So I finished my first story by Henry James: The Turn of the Screw. I had been reading it for days, never quite sure where I had left off the last time because the prose is so dense it isn’t easy to locate yourself. And that was my general impression of the piece–“Man this is dense!”

James created an entire story from the back-and-forth meandering thoughts of the Governness. At no point is the plot terribly exciting or suspenseful. There rarely was a chapter that had me riveted (even his self-concious cliff hangers). But the woman’s overwrought impressions were delightful to decipher.

Upon completion I ran to the web to confirm for myself (by having someone else say it) that Miles had died. For I assumed that he was the man, Douglas, in the beginning who introduced the tale.

But no, he definitely died, and suddenly the entire story is now called in to question. Who was Douglas and what was his relationship with the Governness? Were there really ghosts or just projections of the woman’s extreme worrying? And what of the boy? Was he gay? Did he get expelled from school for pederasty?

So in the end I will say that I did enjoy this story, and will probably continue to read more of James in the future. I feel that his creation of a character’s psyche is something I could do well to imitate. But in the meantime, I am going to start a new book: The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood.

Here’s the background: I was on vacation and hanging out at my friend’s computer lab while she finished her shift at work. I had the overwhelming urge to be reading something, anything, and so fled to a local bookstore. One of those college-towny used stores with large shelves and most anything you might want. Most anything besides the book I went to buy which was an auto-biographical narrative by Christopher Isherwood called Christopher and His Kind. When I couldn’t find it on the shelves I just looked around in that same area and found the Henry James section filled with loads of large boring-looking books and criticism that I felt a pang of guilt about not ever having read. But upon closer examination I realized that these same stories were once sold in much sexier packaging. And so I picked the sexiest, which happened to be the above edition that cost me a mere $2.00. I’m halfway through Screw as we speak. I’ll keep you posted.