I’m at a point in Proust’s “The Captive” that’s been very fun to read -- dramatic, funny, revelatory. You don’t get many moments like that in Proust. Charlus, the blustery, blowhard homosexual who’s had covetous designs on Morel the musician, has finally been exposed, his plans thwarted by Mme Verdurin. Such a character Charlus is. He’s absurd in all things, full of himself, haughty, pushy, delusional in his fancies. Yet you rather like him nevertheless. At a party he spouts off about the homosexual culture of the time—which he claims to know intimately, though of course he believes no one suspects he might be a homosexual himself. He’s speaking to a professor about these matters and at one point blurts out, “It seems rather deplorable, I must say, that I should have to teach a Professor of the Sorbonne his history. But, my dear fellow, you’re as ignorant as a carp.” Hehe Proust uses this phrase many times—being as ignorant as a carp. One does imagine that carp are dumb. I need to start incorporating it into my talk—My dear fellow, you’re as dumb as a carp.

At one point Charlus is speaking about the new generation of gays, how audacious they are, and he says in the tone of “Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists,” that “I don’t condemn these innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t. If they’re so passionately fond of women, why, and especially in this working-class world where it’s frowned upon, where they conceal it from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? It’s because it represents something else to them.” What I thought was interesting was that phrase—‘a bit of brown.’ I’ve never heard it before. What is the origin of that? What does it mean? Am I being to crass in thinking that it refers to shit, to butt fucking?

Charlus has a habit of becoming infuriated at the most innocuous things. You never know when he’ll lash out. And he can be brutal when he does. The protagonist had been on the receiving end of Charlus’ inexplicable rage before, and yet he saw it for what it was—all display and effect without the underlying conviction of his heart. He liked Charlus for this reason. The protagonist witnesses Charlus’ undoing and says, “My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus. For a thousand times less than that I had been visited with his furious rage; no one was safe from it; a king would not have intimidated him… M. de Charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity, when, seized by a rage which had been simmering for a long time, he reduced someone to despair with the most cruel words in front of a shocked society group which had never imagined that anyone could go so far. M. de Charlus, on these occasions, almost foamed at the mouth, working himself up into a veritable frenzy which left everyone trembling.”

Don’t we all wish we had this skill? Upon being wronged or slighted in some immeasurable, even imperceptible way, we launch a ferocious counterattack, eloquent to the ear, infallible and relentlessly compelling in its logic, and fierce in tone. We unfurl this fiery diamond from our tongues, cast beyond our audience a look of distraction, as if to signal we’ve already moved on to more interesting subjects, and exit the room with all the quietude of a Roman bishop, our victory assured. But of course, we only ever stammer until the moment for unfurling anything has passed, and we shrink back into ourselves as the words we should have spoken reverberate mockingly in our heads.

He’s a new idea on how to capture the heart of the one you love. Genet writes in Our Lady of the Flowers, “I have heard it said that one wins the devotion of dogs by mixing a spoonful of their master’s urine in their mash every day. Divine [the drag queen character] tries this. Every time she invites Archangel to dinner, she manages to put a little of her urine into his food.”

As I’m writing, I’m listening on the radio to what the announcer says is the missing, original second movement to Mahler’s first symphony. It’s a great symphony, a 4-movement symphony. I knew that it had originally been 5 movements, and that Mahler at some point had excised one movement from the final, published symphony, but I had no idea the extracted movement had ever been found. The announcer says it was found in the 1960s. A hole pops up in my otherwise nearly complete Mahler collection.

I despise the pretty music of John Rutter. Christ, the seemingly endless supply of that sweet choral music is constantly being thrust upon us.

I don’t really write poetry. I can’t. Or I don’t. To write something and to then proclaim it as a poem is too much for me—I can’t shake the feeling that all the world is saying in unison, “It’s so amateurish.” But once in a while I have impulses to write something. Below are some scribblings towards a poem which I wrote a few months ago but forgot about until I discovered them while leafing through my note book recently. I was feeling frustrated by some chattering women at the table next to me, by boring work and boring work mates, etc. I lost interest in making it into something after the mood has passed.

*****************************************

My inattention as the words
bubble steadily from your wide-eyed face

My nodding head and wandering eyes
to hear you review the important
external customer testing items

My finger-picking at calluses,
the rubbing at my palms
secreted beneath the papers on my lap
to hear your put-on, shop-talk earnestness

My contempt at your proximity to my solace

My anger when you confound my routine

My annoyance at your hopeful come-ons
when my own go unlaunched

My stopped ear to regain my internal dialog
from the din of your commiserating whine

My turning head to find reassurance
that surely there is a better spot

My paralysis in the face of a
litany of hollow possibilities and a shrinking world

My rocking body, twisting ankles, and bouncing feet
to exhaust the overflow of your inexorable stultification

My gnawing jaw to strip the simpering sheathe
from your impotent tongue

My audible dread to hear your unwelcome and needy phone call

The tilt of my head to flag my expansive indifference

My concealed dismissiveness of all that you care about

********************************************
A little harsh, eh? hehe

I’m reading Jean Genet’s novel “Our Lady of the Flowers.” It’s a little rough going, but getting better. It was written in 1943, and it’s a very queer book—queer in all senses of the word—full of rough, dark, crude imagery, sexual imagery, shockingly harsh in its joyless yet poetic language. It’s very much a war-time novel, or so it seems, populated by transvestites, pimps, and prisoners. I’m not far enough into it to say much about it yet. The transvestite character—Divine—says regarding a desire to shit: “I’ve got a cigar at the tip of my lips.”

Sometimes I think gays are better able to let themselves go sexually. Of course it’s just a prejudice, but sometimes when I see a guy taking it up the ass with such total … abandon is the only word… I think at that point how he is holding nothing back, has no inhibitions whatsoever.

I’ve been without things to keep me occupied this week. Yes, I have a little reading to do for work, but that’s really anticipatory, not necessary. The project hasn’t begun in earnest yet. I have things to read, but nothing too interesting, and consequently I fall asleep almost instantaneously upon opening the book. I even have a to-do list, but I can’t bring myself to do any of the tasks. Yes, I should gather together materials for my taxes, but will I ever be able to muster the energy for this one? I should burn CDs to rid my hard drive of some of the mounds of porn (see a previous blog entry re mounds of porn) gathering dust, but even that holds no appeal. I think I want to find a friend or two who has the same interests as I do—classical music, art—and I want to make stained glass pieces immediately. Mostly I want to be put into a deep, shoreless, rocking sleep and to wake up some days from now, tired, and ready for even more sleep … after a hearty meal and satisfying pee.

What can be more irksome than the time wasted whilst waiting for the water from the faucet to turn hot?

God, I love reading the Rorem diaries. I’m currently in the middle of the Nantucket Diaries. It’s such a wonderful assemblage of gossipy reflections on all things dear to Rorem—music, art, the French, gays. It’s all that I love in one place. At one moment Rorem reports on trips made, concerts attended, and compositions underway, and then he’ll relay details of a dinner party with famous personages, and then fly into one of his persistent, recurrent diatribes against Carter and Boulez (which I never fail to thoroughly enjoy). He’ll reflect on old days in Paris, on composer colleagues, on the sexual foibles of famous authors, and I love it all. I may have become quite a snob, but it is this stuff that interests me more than anything. I like talk of culture, art, and sex, and Rorem delivers it all.

Wednesday I begin a French 101. According to Rorem, “For an American to learn French after childhood, he has to (1) want to, (2) be unafraid, even hammish, and (3) work very hard at discovering the equivalent of his personal English as rephrased by the French mot juste.” Not sure what he’s getting at with number 3, but I think I can cover the first two.

I was reviewing recent art actions at Sotheby’s. The whole thing is depressing. It’s quickly becoming clear to me that the average person cannot acquire art. There’s something wrong with that. But ok, so maybe Sotheby’s doesn’t give a good very representative picture of the price of art these days. After all, I have absolutely no interest in paying $2 million for a painting by Andy Warhol of Mickey Mouse (even if I had a spare $2 million). Nor do I even like large chunks of contemporary art, and I have no desire for multimedia installations, sculptures, and such. Interesting paintings are mostly my thing. I was at Spot Coffee the other day and saw the upstairs wall covered in new paintings by some local artist—I don’t remember who. It was uninteresting to me—the art--and it was unreasonably priced. I think artists believe that to seem legitimate, to be respected in some way, their art needs to be expensive. And they’re probably right. But it’s irritating and a source of some sadness that art is reserved for the rich and the privileged (privileged because they can afford art).

I’ve been listening to David Diamond’s Eight Symphony, composed in 1960 and dedicated to Aaron Copland. What surprises me is how much I’m beginning to like it. Diamond’s music after the mid-50s turned dramatically chromatic, less accessible, more stark. This began with his 5th symphony, and since there are no recordings of most of his later symphonies, I’m not sure how they compare. Except for the Eight symphony. I was prepared to write it off as Diamond trying to be “with it,” embracing the avant garde after swimming against the tide for so long. But though it is stark and chromatic, and to be sure, more difficult, there is still greatness in it. It has some wonderful moments, and I’m heartened by the belief that talent and heart prevail for Diamond no matter the style. This man had immense talent, and, if one can believe what others have written about his personality, he was as committed and as serious as one can be about composing music—often times too serious about things, which I very much like. What is better than people who are passionate to the extreme about their work? I’m eager to hear the other later symphonies, if only someone would record them.

As I’m nearing the end of the Nantucket Diary of Rorem, I’ve come across a few entries in which Rorem speaks with great respect and fondness for Diamond. Here’s one dated April 15, 1985: “David Diamond’s seventieth birthday concert last night was powerful and moving. It was moving to see friends of forty years mixed with David’s current post-adolescent pupils honestly weeping, not with the frozen pretense we adopt when one we love has just laid an egg. The power rose from the music, four works chosen obviously for their drive and scope rather than for their prettiness and fun. (The concert was short on fun) Whatever David’s notion about himself—I used to annoy him by talking of his Masterpiece Complex—the evening proved him an elder statesman. Something happened. It’s never too late to change your mind.”

Here’s another, dated October 20, 1985: “Evening alone with David Diamond. Moved, not only by the looks of the thirty-pound score of his Ninth Symphony (surely what he intends it to be: a masterpiece, as well as a piece by a master, though such terms are out of sync with our times), but David himself, seventy now, pale, not rich, dedicated to the roots in a way I’m not, speaking with such tenderness of his sister, Sabina, who in her Rochester clinic has assumed a permanent fetal position though her heart is strong and she prevails. We talk as always of the good old days and of the narrowing future. Not a morning goes by that I don’t, while squinting half awake toward the gray light through the curtain or walking past overturned garbage cans in the rain on Amsterdam Avenue, ask myself how this would seem with the stink of a hangover or the authority of ten rye whiskies. All these sober years. Yet I remain as close to a blackout as that bottle across the room. DD’s patience, and my exasperation (I’d roll my eyes & sigh in front of other students), with our mutual pupil, old Gladys Fisher, twenty-five years ago in Buffalo.”