Lately I've been unusually motivated to write, all the more unusual because I've not been motivated for anything else. This blog being a sort of diary, and me reading Rorem's diary, together make me wish I could write as engagingly as Rorem. I'd allow him his charmed and famous life, brimming as it is with the artistic elite of the times, if only I could write as well.

I spent the early afternoon sitting out at a table at Cibon reading the Rorem diaries. Lately I've been spending more time there, especially during the day. I've noticed that nearly every day in the afternoon I see the same guy take a table. He's always dressed for work, a dress shirt, tie, nice pants, brown shoes, and a book bag hung over his shoulder. He might be attractive except that he has a disconcerting skunk-like white streak in his hair at the center of his forehead, this on a guy in his twenties. I like him, though, simply from what I observe. (I sense he's entirely straight, to eliminate that dimension straightway...) He'll sit down, order a coffee or some other drink, and read the paper, or occasionally play chess or just talk with a friend. Today I saw him arrive with a bakery bag. From the bag he pulled out a wonderful little loaf of bread and a carton of soup and then began dipping the bread into the soup as he read the NY Times. I left to do some things at 4 PM. Hours later, at about 7:30, I happened to pass by Cibon and looked at the crowd sitting outside. He was still there, leaning against the wall at a corner table, reading! Freshly baked goods and soup, coffee at a café, idle chat with friends, and hours of reading alone in between... what could be finer?

Lately I've had the unsupportable urge to paint—canvases and oils. I have no talent, and seldom even care much about the visual arts. It's a passing fancy, one I won’t indulge. But I would like to work on something.

Rorem is constantly complaining about writing or text being too "arch" or having too much "arch." I have no idea what he means.

Rorem: "To be continually obsessed with sex, except during the act, when the mind wanders." So true, at least with the more casual sex I've had with men. For days I'm focused upon it, until I'm in the midst of it. Then it's an internal dialog with myself substituting for the necessary familiarity that makes for good sex.

In the later diaries Rorem repeatedly riles against the hysteria surrounding child molestation, recalling fondly that at the age of 14 he was *arranging* to be molested. I have mixed feelings about it.

Days later...

I must write more things about Rorem’s diaries, even though I think no one who might read this is interested in Rorem or his diaries. Nevertheless, I am, so ...

I'm enjoying them more than I have any book I've read in quite a while. And I think I was too hasty to complain of his dour tone in the last diary. It IS dour, but he retains a sense of humor, and I so enjoy reading his opinions and unrelated thoughts. I think I love this Rorem, the older Rorem.

A fan in 1994 sent him a picture of a moment in Madonna’s book "Truth or Dare" in which Madonna is flipping through his Rorem’s Paris Diary. To this he says, "It's downhill all the way for me now." I think he was not entirely joking here, which I love. He loves his notoriety, his fame, accepted gladly from all quarters.

Rorem occasionally remarks about great persons or art that he doesn't much care for. Beethoven, for example. On Frank Lloyd Wright: "His architecture has always struck me as frigid, un-homey, pretentious, simple, dangerously jagged." Amen to this. Wright's a sacred cow I could do without. More than the sacred cows, though, I enjoy his so very regular jabs and strikes against Elliot Carter. I'm utterly sympathetic, of course. He regularly strikes out at Boulez too, but without the good-natured eye-rolling that he gives Carter. He respects Boulez too much for that; with Carter the sarcasm is thick, and funny. He chides a NY Times columnist for regularly working Carter's name into every column, as if Carter were the standard for all things. Rorem suggests that the columnist should rename his column "On Elliot Carter and Other Matters." Lol I love that sort of jealously.

In 1991 he wrote that he had been 8 years without sex with another person, though he masturbated regularly as per his doctor's instructions (no doubt to help his ailing prostate—it's best to keep the prostate empty of seminal fluid). His enduring fantasy whilst masturbating? "A person kneels (is it me? Yet I'm also always observing) before the crotch of a very male unshaven but otherwise shadowy form wearing what the French call salopettes. Pungent aroma, sweat, smegma, locker room. One-sided blow job.... As a youth, I'd be getting fucked, and am forever a 'bottom.' But the image blurs with the years into something impersonal yet awfully erotic..." I have NO fantasy upon which to draw. I have no fantasy life at all, none. But for the abundance of porn on the web (and on my hard drive... for my hard-on), where would my masturbation practices be? What if I became blind? How to lust when one is blind?

Rorem didn't see "Planet of the Apes" until 1989. Having finally seen it, he says, aptly, that it is "unwatchable with Heston's tomcat smirk robbed from Gable, and the sophomoric script." Is it perhaps Heston that is unwatchable?

At least three times Rorem mentions the type of gay male that repels him. It's not the "madly effeminate nor the comically macho;" It's the "tight-lipped, smart, bossy, humorless, teacherly brand—'One of those mean ones,' as Ben Weber used to say." God, yes. I've just begun the fourth volume of Proust—"Sodom and Gomorrah." It begins with the narrator's realization that a mean old man is gay. He's not quite the sort that Rorem describes, but what can be meaner than a mean gay? Rorem claims the same breed can be found also among fringe heterosexuals such as married parsons, congressmen, and even William Buckley.

Here's one for Ann. On a visit to Virgil Thomson, Rorem presented Thomson with a cucumber soap, to which Thomson responded, "Just imagine, someone recently gave me some tangerine soap, which I never use." It was Rorem who had given him the tangerine soap. Haha I think I'd enjoy both soaps.

Rorem is not a shopper, apparently. "The horror of buying clothes.... After procrastinating for a year I'll enter the store, buy anything expensive, then leave in three minutes."

For all the gay men who've wasted countless hours looking for sex (and who among us does not do that ... repeatedly?): "No outsider knows the unthinkably time-consuming rigors of cruising." Yes, rigors!