Tangents and Conditions

So Wednesday on the couch where I still spend a consquential amount of time, my shrink, as her ilk are wont, picked up on something I had said about my hesitations about plunging into writing and said, "follow those traces." I think what I'd just said was something about how I didn't know where the traces of Berlin were going to end up settling this time around, where they were going to be déposées. That's one of those charged words in my analysis, déposé. It has to do with traces and remains. Caroline has been described several times in analysis as déposée in me. Now she, or at least her remains, are a little more firmly installed in the name I’m signing with. It also happens to be a name I have now actually published under. In French!

Part of the charge of that particular word déposé comes from Genet, because it’s close to the word disposition. In one of his late interviews, after he got throat cancer and somehow survived for years hanging out with Palestinians, he talks about the "disposition" that brought him to writing. I can almost cite him word for word. "I understood that certain things in my life were blocked for me." And so he was disposed to writing. And to hanging out with Black Panthers and Palestinians. Lucky fucker. With that hard cross he bore after writing his way out of prison and into the theater, he basically haunted hotels waiting to die. And along came Angela Davis and the others. Towards the end of his life, all he had to do was to show the world how he bore the traces of those others in him. It's bonkers, that late book, "Prisoner of Love." And often very very beautiful.

Maybe I run into trouble when I ask for too much. Genet didn't seek out the Panthers or the Palestinians. They just came to him. There’s a sort of famous quote from him where he talks about how wrong it would be to say that he had done anything to advance the causes of those groups. Quelle sottise, he says, refering to the fact that people often ask him why he is helping the Palestinians. "Bullshit. They helped me live." I love the extravagance of that gesture.

They're not Palestinians, and not (yet?) in anything like the impossible position Palestinians are in, but I have been hanging out with some boys that are helping me live, some but not all of whom I met in Berlin. They all, though, end up having some relation to that beautiful Babylon. And I think one way of saying lots of the many things my mind has been up to is to say that I’m translating Berlin. First of all, all that writing about Berlin from April 2008 that's archived here on this site ended up being something like the contact sheets for a publication that meant rethinking what those pieces were doing and figuring out how the pictures in prose were supposed to be arranged on the page. To do that, I had to translate them into French and hear several people tell me how maybe the things seemed weird, no doubt because they were written in English. Quelle sottise. I'm pretty fucking weird in English, too. The whole thing was not entirely unsuccessful. I learned I knew a little bit about how to fight, and I don't even think anyone was killed in the battle. There's actually another party for the journal, Monstre, this coming weekend. I went to the first one for the release of the thing in November and was entirely too cranky and exhausted to have much fun. This Friday, though, I'm supposed to be meeting an on-line friend who likes to expand assholes and is some kind of a tangential element to this Monstre-world. That should be fun. Tangents are essential, as I've always known, but now I'm in a position where I can follow through on a few of them. Translating Berlin is a lot about that, about being careful about where certain tangents are leading me. Walter Benjamin: "Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux."

Last weekend there were several tangents touching and shooting off into their linguistic flux. And they are more good evidence that translating Berlin goes beyond just translating whatever words I can put together in whichever languages about the time I spend there. At the moment, as you can tell, I’m as interested in the surplus to Berlin as in Berlin while I was there. This is because I, like you and like, I think, a lot of us, need a little bit of structure in my life and in my writing. And I think that a blog is a place where we work on the conditions for that structure. Maybe it’s a place where we can plot out the trajectories of some of those tangents Benjamin would have us thinking about and get some kind of a working map of the crazy force field working its way through us as we work our way through it.

So last weekend started last Thursday, a week ago today. I’ve been trying to write my way into it and into Berlin and trying to figure out how those two fields of writing are working on one another and how exactly I can say how they work, and if they can afford, too, other kinds of writing. (Jesus—look at that sentence. No wonder it takes a little while for us to work our way back here when we’ve been off on a hiatus for a while.)

So last Thursday my weekend started, after attempts at translating a great little book—my first real contract for a book translation, difficult, critical, philosophical, fun—by making my way to the theater. Since I’ve been on hiatus, I haven’t been blogging up my theatrical ventures, but one of the more remarkable ones this past fall was a big-ass mother-fucking piece by an old Greek fag named Dimitris Dimitriadis. He rocks. By which I mean that I discovered in his writing some kind of a kindred spirit, a brother. I have such a profound inutition for what his writing was up to over the course of his life. The first play by him that we saw was called Dying as a Country and it involved something like a hundred and fifty extras. (In French, “extras” are called “figurants.” I like the play between those two terms.) It takes place during a civil war. People are dying by the wayside. There are soldiers and sterile women and mass open graves. I quote, translating from the French, “And there were more than a few of them,” (ie, the soldiers caught up in this devastating war), “who waited in horror for night to fall, because a mute flow would rise up under the bones of their skulls and they would feel the while sky compress within them, and in their heads galaxies and infinite expanses would pulse with a piercing silence that would unleash their inarticulate cries, and would make them coil up in their beds as if they had been struck by the worst pain...” I remember crying to that line. The play is actually a kind of monologue, but it had been staged to be carried by a core of about ten or fifteen Greek actors who would come to a microphone, most of the time, to say their spell. That particular moment was enuniciated by a woman wearing the cutest little red leather jacket. Somehow, I can remember with a certain amount of precision the way she articulated those particular lines, even though they were in Greek and I was reading the supertitles in French. Her voice went slightly into her head as she talked about those imploding galaxies in the soldiers’ heads. Standing up, her arms were stretched out behind her head as if she were laying down, like the soldiers whose torturous existence she was narrating. As she said that line about the galaxies imploding, her hands clenched up into fists that then opened up behind her head. The extras, the figurants, were all lined up in a circle that went in one of the doors to the theater and out the other. Some of what was going on outside—at some point, for example, they all start to sing, and, at another, snow begins to fall—was transmitted by video onto the screen at the back of the theater. As I hope that little excerpt shows, the prose being spoken was so amazingly beautiful, but what was most amazing was that most of it was spoken in Greek, with French supertitles, and you could hear maybe not every little aspect of its beautiful density, but really? A whole damn lot.

So, with our faithful theater-going friend Andreas, Thierry and I had made a date to go see another play by him in the same theater: The Vertigo of Animals Before the Slaughter. This one was performed in French. Beforehand, we were all more than a little nervous. We hadn’t realized that we had signed up for three hours and twenty minutes of modern Greek tragedy, and we were all a little afraid. I even moreso than the others, because I had watched about a minute of video of the production on-line, and it had looked scarily stultifying and very French. We were also joined by Andreas’s Pierre and Pierre’s colleague Katja, and we all agreed that we could leave at the intermission, if we wanted to.

The end of the play allows you to understand exactly what has been going on throughout the play up until then. It reenacts the beginning of the play, where the audience saw two older men awkwardly acting the roles of two younger men. One of them tells the other that he has exciting news, and that he is getting ready to get married. This sends the other literally into a prophetic spew that is really very funny. He says that the other will have a lovely family of some incredible amount of children and that they will be happy up until the point when the children reach a certain age. Then the prophetic spew really begins, which has to do with his friend’s success and all of the havoc it will wreack on his family, involving, of course, lots of incest and horror. At the end of the spew, the dude sort of steps back, like, what the fuck was that all about and where did it come from? I think I was already giggling, because it was either at that moment or at one slightly further on that the lady in front of us, who apparently really didn’t get what was going on, turned around to stare at me, wondering what in the hell I was chortling at. Soon, though, there were enough people tuned in to what was going on on stage and, in particular, to the words the actors were saying that I wasn’t the only chortler.

The prophesy was, of course, entirely accurate, and the vast majority of the play brings the characters to full, stunned articulation of the horror. The daughter goes crazy because her father falls in love with her, the two sons fall in love with each other, one of them assassinates the prime minister and shacks up with the father’s friend who had prophesied all of these events, while the other starts sleeping with the mother who bears and smothers his child at the end of the play within the play. All, it is implied, because the father denied his love for his friend and got married. All because of what that brought to be born of the pen of the poet. All the beautiful, luscious indulgent speech of these crazy people that you can so easily identify with until you freak out and realize what horror you are watching. The actress playing the mother is named Claude Perron, and I recognized her from this film made by Godard’s partner Anne-Marie Miéville called After the reconciliation. I didn’t love that movie, but I did love the way she at one point growls in this gutteral snarl, “Rrrrroooberrrrt,” which is the name of the character played by Godard. I recognized her right away. Her first big monologue—which is actually probably the moment I chortled and got looked askance at by the lady in front of me—is addressed to God the night before she fucks her husband for the first time and evokes all of the elaborate pleasures she expects from it. Luscious stuff. At the turning point of the play, the house expands into a palace, and all of a sudden the family is sitting on more excess than they know what to do with. And then they have to figure out how to deal with it, which they don’t. It drives them mad, in beautiful ways that really did make me think that this play was doing what a tragedy is supposed to: giving you that chill of identification with monsters trapped in situations far beyond their control. It also made me think that I never really thought that particular shudder could involve often hardy laughter.

At the end of the play, we see something like its obverse potential, the way the play and its tragedy might not have been. The father’s friend has invited the family to come and see the spot where he and his father used to meet. This happens just to the other side of this kind of screen that has been used throughout the play, and it’s an obvious kind of nod to realist or naturalist theater. You watch all of the characters we’ve been seeing doing crazy things file on stage, disappear behind the screen that obscurse their forms, and you hear the father’s friend say what the importance of the place was to him and to their father. The friend sends them on their way, wishing them the best before emerging from behind the screen to face the audience wielding a pair of scissors. He sticks out his tongue and cuts it off while we gasp.

Goodness me, what good a smart and funny tragedy can do for you. I knew I was pushing things a little bit, but I’d heard that a new club night called Bordello was happening for the first time that night in central Paris. The idea behind it was to make a sex-club fun again, to put some sexy alternative pop on so the cuties could dance around and to try and do something that Berlin does ever so much better than Paris seems to be able to swing. It’s still definitely the case that Berlin swings things that way much better than Paris does, even if Bordello happens again, but I was all for the initiative. Plus, Vincent had invited me to come on Facebook. Remember him? He’s the one who’s with Julien. They’re that lovely couple we met this past summer. I remember naming the time spent with them in their lovely little house in northeast Paris “a promising parenthesis.” It turns out it was indeed just a parentheses. We went to their country house in August, and that’s a whole other story, but after that we hadn’t heard much from them. It turns out that we didn’t see so much of them, because when they got back from vacation, Vincent found out that he had been let go at his job. We had run into them the weekend before, it had been nice, and Vincent had invited me to come to Bordello, this fun sex party, on Facebook. Even after three and a half hours of luscious contemporary Greek tragedy, I felt like I couldn’t quite just go home without giving it a go. So Thierry and I decided he would go just for a quick drink before the last metro, and I would either go back home with him or else stay and shake my tooshie if I found it in motion.

Julien and Vincent were there, and so were some other boys that I recognized from around. Thierry ended up running into this guy that he met at the Lab in Berlin. I wonder how many European boys’ lives turn out that place? More than a few. Mine does. It’s part of the Berghain, which is where the big Easter party happens. It’s the space that has the happy dance floor where so much goes on. I’ll tell you what went on there in January at some point, but for now its importance is that it was where Thierry met Christophe without ever knowing his name. The night we went there in January, we had noticed him because he’s beautiful and also because he was smoking pot. This was the weekend I had rented out a playroom for Thierry and me to celebrate his birthday in. We did celebrate, and that was a lot of fun. But on Friday, all of the drugs I’d been working so hard to assemble for our fucking pleasures were not yet assembled. They were for Saturday, which was a good if somewhat schizophrenic thing. But that Friday night, we went to the Lab sans drugs and Thierry ended up fucking around with Christophe without ever really finding out his name. Apparently, Christophe told Vincent that he picked Thierry up off of the floor at the Lab, which is, I think, a bit of an exaggeration, but which also seemed entirely imaginable to me. Vincent told me this while I was making my way to the coat-check (which, hello, cost 5 euros!), saying that it was a little strange because he was almost sure that Thierry was making out just to the side of the dancefloor with one of the two guys they’d come to Bordello with. “There’s something a little incestuous about this whole thing,” he laughed. I countered with, “I just spent three and a half hours watching a contemporary Greek tragedy where the mother and the son have a baby, so I really don’t think this is going to be a problem.”

Christophe was there with his German boyfriend Frank who lives in Berlin. I think I’ve met, seriously, like, (I’m counting), five Frank’s since I went to Berlin in January. So that when this particularly sexy Frank said “I’m Frank,” I think my answer was something like, “Right, of course you are.” Frank had my name on his t-shirt, which through its safety pins said “Anarchy Will” in a punk slant down the front of it. He felt dumb when, after we’d been making out and dancing around for a good hour or two, he asked me my name again. Ever patient and understanding, I said something like, “Oh, don’t feel bad,” and he said, “Yeah, but look,” and fingered over the letters of my name on his t-shirt. I smiled and got back to dancing with him.

I talked and danced and kissed a lot, with Frank and with Christophe, with Julien and with Vincent. It was fun. I was expending myself almost as if I were in Berlin, with the idea of Berlin the background and even in the fore, since Christophe was something like an import even though he’s French. The most beautiful moment of the evening was undoubtedly when, in between kisses and massages, Christophe asked me how long I’d been living in Paris. “Ten years,” I answered. At which point this incredibly sexy man—whose pectorals are so beautiful that some obscure part of me is still absolutely certain that if I sucked them long and hard enough, I would end up drinking milk—plunged down to the floor and kneeled before me, staggered by the force it must have demanded of me. I’ve said to a few people since then, including my shrink, that this was so exactly what I’ve needed for so long: just an ounce of recognition for the feat of my survival in and around Paris represents. I haven’t yet totally given up on the idea that that survival of mine might, if I follow through on some of the tangents that work their way through my conditions, morph into some kind of life.

A preface to what is to come

OK. So I've just been in Berlin for the longest time ever, up until now. That means I have a lot to write about and figure out.

I have a hat now, a little skater's cap, that hardly leaves my head. Today I went to buy a cigar for some sex tomorrow night and to get loops put into my ears that are a couple of milimeters wider than the one I have been wearing for the last, jesus, decade or so at least. That involved reopening a hole. In about a month, I can go get the next step up with the loops. I'm aiming for some thick posts. I'm thinking colors, like maybe green on one side and blue on the other. You know, like the ground and the sky. Things like this happen because I was on vacation in Berlin for a month, working a little bit for me. They're like wonderful unavoidable surplus from my time there. I'm ready to go back in a heartbeat, even into the heart of the worst winter Berlin has had in seventeen years. Even in those conditions, I find myself differently there, and with others, confident in the difference I'm discovering and the difference I'm making with those few with whom something like a relation begins. There are a few people like that I want to tell you about, and they're just as incomparable as you and me. I'd be happy if my paths crossed with any of theirs again. I look forward to it.

I went to Berlin thinking that even in winter I might find a prairie or two: somewhere wide and welcoming, where the wind can tickle your hair and might stir your pen to write. I think I found one or two, but it took some effort and of the hardest kind: the effort to let go. It's amazing what you get when you quit looking for what you thought you wanted. Just so long as there's more, whatever you get is good.

You know how it goes: I've somehow come back with a life that was already here to be lived, it's just that I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. I'm careful all of a sudden with what I'm doing with my time. I'm aware of efforts I spend, and can feel pleased when they sometimes bear some fruit. Let's keep it up.

sara and steve once spent a whole morning rescuing horseshoe crabs. they did the exact same thing. and some queen sailed over and said "they are hatching their eggs. they just crawled the equivalent of however the fuck many miles to a hatching ground."

and steve and sara had placed them back in the water.

irrevocable climate change. did you read that report. it's done.

that's where i'm at and why i've been quiet.

xo j

The Rest of Us

Hey there. Troubled times, so I'm really just reading around trying to make sense of what I can. Just finished another novel. It's just come out in French. It's by Stéphane Audeguy, and I'm liking it much much more than his first one which I read when it came out. It's called Nous Autres in French, and I think it should be titled The Rest of Us in English. A "we" narrates the novel, and we readers are given to understand that the narrator is basically all of the attentive dead of Africa. Here's a translation of its last paragraph, which has me on the verge of tears.

"One morning, Pierre discovers an extremely bizarre trace of something all the way at the end of the beach. It’s a kind of ribbon made up of little twists. It’s impossible for him to imagine what had left such a wake in the sand. He slowly follows it, trying to understand, trembling at the idea that this mysterious mark might just stop somewhere, thereby forever keeping its secret. At the moment the hesitant writing of this unknown life seems to him to be the most moving sign of the world’s grace. It goes on for another twenty yards. Finally, he sees a little shellfish quietly making its way with uncertain steps. Pierre calculates the fact that, in proportion to its size, this hermit-crab has just covered the equivalent of two thousand kilometers in this sandy desert. But he’s done so walking parallel to the ocean: the animal is moving surely towards a hideous and slow death. Pierre watches it for a long time. And then he can’t take it anymore, he picks up the animal, it quickly folds itself up into the bottom of its shell, he goes down to the sea and places it carefully into shallow water. He waits. Soon it goes about its business, incomprehensible, indifferent to the miraculous rescue of which it has just been the object. Pierre goes back towards the bungalows. His joy is as pure as the ungrateful crustacean’s joy, now entirely absorbed by the delicate pleasures of life in a lagoon, and the craziest wind won’t be able to shut us up, and our words on the earth one vast tomb."

Dancing Barefoot: A Triptych

Sunday afternoon

When I came across the drum corps, I didn’t realize it was carnival time. There were probably about thirty of them, with their different drums, dressed more or less the same. Coming upon it from our place, once enough of the people standing in front of you had filtered away, you had a great view of the drum corps leader who raised his hands to signal the upcoming shifts in rhythm. He would lift up his chin, often several times over in sync with the rhythm he was getting ready to modulate. He would lift up his eyes, too, and seemed almost as happily surprised as the rest of us listeners were once the crew got where he had been telling them to go. Then he would turn around, dancing with his own drum, making a grimace of pleasure. People watching them couldn’t help but be moved, often physically, letting it go into their hips or their heads. All of that rhythm illuminating all of our faces.

As we were walking away from it, T said exactly what was on my mind. I said, Qu’est-ce que j’adore ça, a drum corps, rhythm you can’t escape and that makes people giving themselves up to it so beautiful. T responded, Ca me donne envie de pleurer. The tears T named and that I felt welling up, too, come from being ravished at the sight of people's implication in that beauty, but also from the realization of all that we’re missing out on when we’re isolated in front of our various screens. And from finding what we were missing, by surprise, in the street.

“What’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ plenty of things missing…”

Thursday night at the movies: 35 Rhums

They’re on the way to a concert when her much beloved taxi breaks down. It’s pouring down rain as the four of them get out of the car to push it with a chorus of entirely understandable yet jovial screaming. They find a bar that’s open and go in for a drink. The bar owner’s son waits on them, telling them that it’s closing time and he can only serve them one drink. They leave, and the taxi-driver calls her colleague Pierre, speaking to him so loudly that the other three keep telling her not to scream. Pierre won’t be able to come and get them until much later. The concert will already be over. Still drenched, they go to knock on the door of a café that we soon realize is the one they’ve just left. One of them insists that the owner let them in, and he is so beautiful that the owner eventually concedes. While the taxi-driver calls Pierre back to tell him they won’t be needing him to come pick them up, “Nightshift” (“Marvin/ sang of the joy and pain…”) comes on and they start dancing.

The film’s story is about a love between a father and his daughter, and that is the pair we watch start the dance. Much of the beauty of the dancing, though, comes from the way who ends up dancing with whom, who breaks in on whose dance when, how the one lets go of the other is a choreography not only of their rhythm, but of the forms of their relations to one another. None of these relations are simple, but as they dance, everything becomes clear. They are stranded in the rain without transportation, and, instead of panicking, they allow themselves to be who they are, essentially in relation to one another. They make me want to be a part of us.

Saturday night: MoNA

Friday, our sex-buddy O came over with a big fat joint and we had a lot of fun, except for the unfortunate moment when the tilting world threw T for a curve and he scampered off for loud retching in the bathroom. So Saturday, we took it easy all day long. Our traditional morning-market forewent the traditional Saturday chicken, and we headed out for an Indian lunch. We followed it up with a stroll in the neighborhood, a coffee and some pinball, and an exhibit up the hill at this nifty little place called Le Plateau. N, of Romy Schneider fame from the last entry, had invited us to come for drinks at his studio on Friday, and saw right through T’s stutters when T explained we had other plans. N got to make fun of us for that on Saturday night. It so happened that we’d bought a big enough roast beef at market and I was raring to make a gratin. We had fresh green beans, too, so N and his beloved G came over for a meal. We invited Babar, who’d been on our mind and was on the other end of G’s cell as they walked in the door, at even more of the last minute. N’s cell phone had run out of batteries, so he hadn’t received our text message saying that we wanted to check out MoNA, a club night just down the street. As a result, they were all a little taken aback at the idea of going out. We’d also been talking about MoNA with S, who’s happily still around, and he came over after dinner and after thinking he was going to be able to see the YSL collection that’s been making headline news since then for showing that in spite the apparent dearth of it, there are some people in the world who have lots and lots of money to spend on famous people’s art. He and a friend had gone to the Grand Palais where the collection was on display for all to see before the auction started, had looked at the line, and S apparently decided it was time to join us and go dancing. In other words, we were porous and wanted to go out.

I haven’t danced that much in a long time. The porous we I was a part of is I think largely to thank for how easy it was for me to get going. Probably, too, the fact that for some reason I found myself at the threshold of the dance floor giving an archaeology of the term “queer” to G. French people of a certain ilk use the term, and fairly often these days, in English. Queerly enough, it ends up sounding like the French word for leather, cuir, especially when I use it because I like both so much. Translation takes time and effort, and I found myself explaining to G how “queer” got mobilized in the late 80’s and early 90’s, that it means weird, but has always had the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity. I explained how modernists like Woolf and James used the term in ways that we started to pay attention to back then, and that it’s sad to lose that genealogy when we use the term without translating it, really, in French. At some magical point, our conversation dwindled down and the rhythm picked us up. G and Babar left around 2, but T and S and I kept shaking our booty until 4. T invited S up, but S politely declined, saying he was a little pompette, which is a cute way of saying tipsy. So T and I stumbled upstairs, went at it until about 5 and slept late until the next day.

There's more than one way to show myself letting myself go.


the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming?
why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women

showing myself letting myself go.

that was careless of me, and i apologize. when that song came on i was thrown back to toledo. spain. it was mid-summer and we'd endured an almost unendurable train ride from madrid. in the dead heat of the day, i forgot to watch the clouds and the sun; those incredible formations in el greco. storms came in, without even coalescing, just a wall of mist and electricity and streamed through and left as soon as they came. i'd fallen asleep, drooling. i know this sounds almost too much, but someone had a guitar. so i fell asleep to the guitar, privacy falling around us, and the heat was so dry. it would suddenly start raining and disturb the earth and the rolling fields, the grasses that had two sides, shining and dull with dust so that it came in through the windows. and we were going to read st. theresa's hot manuscripts, with god's heat and his burning landscape. but just then i was sleeping and uncomfortable. maybe i was afraid the guitar string would snap.

so there was like, this church of privacy around us. out of my mind, disoriented and groggy, in my dream, and a man came around selling cokes. so david got me a coke and i sat up, grumpy, and then was really easily charmed. blinked like a baby owl. i love you, coke! the guitar player still wasn't very good, a german student with a backpack and lots of little braids, colors and strings in his hair. pretty sure he was square-jawed and solid. i leaned against the window and watched his forearms. they had the golden fur i love so much. the corded muscles from rock climbing. it's a small mystery of arms that just kills me.

anyway, tomorrow and the next day i'm also pretty sure work is going to be a fucking jerk so it's nice to remember those very strong, very furry and masculine forearms and really how very bad his rendition was of "wild world' or whatever cat stevens it was and how cold my drink going down. my dear, be bright. remember this.

that secret that we know, that we don't know how to tell.... is that christmas morning? 19a. Jesus said: Blessed is the one who existed before coming into being.

showing myself letting myself go. so i'm just saying don't stress the lengths of your sentences. it reads better to me in everyday language, colloquial (the way we breathe, have sex, meander, star-gaze on a cold winter night)... but i also have this kind of joyous quirk when you veer off into exhaustion, when your "self" blurs. like that nice moment with you and t. after your debut. that's all. also... grief and missing someone that much. what's left but to turn to someone you love and take them in. i'll represent you in this wilderness as best i can. because i love you and i'm starting to love myself, and you will change, or (please, no. not again. do not leave yourself) leave. but stay if you can and love me. thank you for loving something in what i'm sending your way.

and how did all those books start? in the kitchen of the murray house, and then somehow charles wallace and meg always goes for a walk to the star-watching rock. thats how they start. one foot in front of the other. and you know, like 3 immortal beings and a unicorn or a seraphim thrown in there. (and someone in the murray family is always making someone else hot cocoa. swear to god). they become about love and time travel and getting back to something like trust and grace with things that are familiar, and so readily problematic to the larger society. like fucking, for example. that the relativity of connection has no underlying foundation, there's no relative ethics to breathing, i mean truth.

i re-read a swiftly tilting planet last summer. happily crashed out on the daybed on my mother's porch with the morning sun, my little sherpa hat, wool sweater and coffee; and realized, startled, that you could change time. (also, i'm wearing the exact same things tonight. i used to wear this hat after i got out of the pool, during winter practices. it was dead cold outside and this awesome hat, brought back from macchu piccu in peru kept me warm. i was warm and my muscles hummed and there was a sweet ache thru my body all day. i could shrug and feel the last sprint, the last careening 100 yards all the way through my back. the stretch of it, and black ice-hot concentration). 52. His disciples said to him: Twenty-four prophets spoke to israel, and they spoke of you. He responded to them: You have deserted the living one who is with you, and you spoke about the dead.

like, what do you actually go through waiting on line to get into the club. you text, you talk, smoke... and then all that convolution stops with a smile, or eye contact and another contractual agreement starts.

and then you wait for the bus, exhausted.

your grief wants to sing for you. let it appear scattered and corralled by shadows, there's a cascading hill behind you, thoughts dripping with honey. because the loss is there. and you need to take it thru it's paces.

i feel like the commitment, however small, to constellations is fine as far as it goes. but this really is about you. your ability to understand that you're dealing with something that is both utterly material, with material consequences, and utterly immaterial at the same time. no contradictions need to be resolved. "but that this act requires fundamentally transforming the dominant logic models of Western science. It requires moving beyond the mutually exclusive, non-paradoxical model in which all contradictions must be resolved."

i think it's slightly hysterical that science is catching up with being. "your blood like so many ribbons in a tornado" frank o'hara. he says somewhere else "What an oak!"

i was born to adore you
as a baby in the blind
i was born to represent you
to carry in the sun
to carve your face into the back of the sun

antony, the crying light

so let me finish with frank o'hara, again:

We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

a song just came on:

Let I
I was born to adore you
As a baby in the blind
I was born to represent you
To carry your head into the sun
To carve you face into the back of the sun

Caroline's First Turn

So, last week, on Tuesday we inaugurated Obama and on Friday Caroline took her first turn on stage. Obama declaimed a sober and sobering speech, which didn’t stop any of us from getting giddy about, for example, Aretha’s hat, weepy at what it means when Aretha sings “Land where my fathers died,” cranky about how over-determined – my word, like you say, although it is borrowed – is this handsome and potentially great man’s load and how little margin for maneuver it would seem he’s going to claim for him- and ourselves, and happy at the reality of people dancing in the streets, singing with each other to praise him. Caroline – you know this, as no doubt do many of any people who read this site – is me in a dress. Her turn on stage was a brazen attempt at “La Javanaise,” one of the most well loved songs in the popular French repertoire, at a little self-labeled “boite des frissons” in the capital for a night in honor of the quintessential dirty old man with incredibly chiseled lyrics, Serge Gainsbourg. The audience knew the chorus, and they are the kind of audience who can’t help themselves from singing along. This might have been a good thing, because apparently, they were having trouble hearing the incredibly chiseled lyrics of which I miraculously did not flub a one. (It may be one of the most well loved songs in the repertoire, but nobody I’ve run across yet knows the lyrics to the stanzas, just the chorus.) Which is a good thing that’s also too bad considering nobody could hear them. This is a technical problem that may find solutions. The other queens have been known to complain about the insufficiency of the microphone set-up at said “boite des frissons.” But I think it was, as Mistress of the house Madame Hervé said right after the show, “that you didn’t sing loud enough! Nobody could hear you!”

Madame Hervé is a notoriously hard nut. My girlfriend Julie Guirlande told me afterwards as we were jiggling in our boy drag on the dancefloor that you just have to let whatever she says flow over you like water, but certainly not to let on that she might be getting to you. It took all Saturday for it to become water. Before she told me I hadn’t sung loud enough, Madame Hervé had already called me to order because I’d been out of the dressing room before the show. This is in large part because the dressing room measures all of about 15 square feet and involves no more than a curtain that sections off a sliver of dancefloor space right next to the stage. Iow, you want to get out of there. But apparently, staying in the dressing room before the show is a house rule that nobody had told me about. My girlfriend Melissa sheepishly apologized for not having said something. The other girls who’ve had a little more experience know that you can go out of the dressing room without incurring Madame Hervé’s wrath, but only if you’ve brought another dress to wear. Preferably with another wig. That’s what Jacqueline Genoux did. And then she had to come back to the tiny dressing room to put the elaborate feather-construction down the back of her second dress. Melissa had the same elaborate feather-construction to put on because they were doing a really funny duo together. The elaborate feather-construction involved a stick from which sprouted three feathered prongs. Which meant that wherever you were in the tiny dressing-room space, there were feathers under your nose. So there I was sitting in my dress waiting my turn on stage fighting with the feathers, trying to remember the terribly chiseled lyrics that I sometimes forget, vaguely hearing Taillefine do “Elisa,” Julie Guirlande do “La Madrague,” Lady Zoa do an incredibly vigorous “Pull Marine;” before it was my turn.

In her boy drag after the show, Julie Guirlande also underlined how nice Madame Hervé’s introduction of the “petite nouvelle” who would be me was. She asked everybody to give the “petite nouvelle” who would be me a warm round of applause. Which they did. And I haven’t mentioned it yet, but, in case you can't tell in the above picture, I was really pretty. And, like a big girl, I had done almost all of my makeup myself. But the whole thing really felt like a catastrophe. Madame Hervé did get to me. People couldn’t hear what I was saying. I had a whole bevy of supporters, like, among the most important, B, who had canceled a night out elsewhere to come be adorable and supportive with his adorable new “petit” P and with E, B’s office mate and fellow Thursday afternoon cake-partaker. While I was out working the crowd in restricted pre-show territory, B saw me and put up his fingers like I was a vampire. I think he has issues with the whole gender trouble thing. Or at least with my whole gender trouble. After all, he did fall for me as a topping boy in leather with a beard. And that is actually one of the things I’m having trouble getting my head around. I mean, myself in make-up really tends to fuck with people’s minds, and there is a whole elaborate distance that settles in between me in makeup and, for example, the people with whom I had just a couple of hours earlier been drinking wine while trying to find a bimbo’s song that I could sing for the next Folle Académie night at the Tango. There is a whole choreography of how to negotiate that distance and make it work for me and for them that I’m only just now becoming aware of. And apparently people really don’t recognize me. Which seems very strange to me, because, strangely enough, I do. I mean, when I look in the mirror while I’m doing the make-up, it’s just as strange as when I look at myself in the mirror without make-up. It’s all strange when you’re staring at yourself in a mirror.

My friend N was there. Once I’d taken off my makeup and dress, I went out for a cigarette with Lady Zoa and N came out, too. N has this idea that I don’t give enough of myself away, and he saw what felt to me like Caroline’s catastrophe as yet another incidence of that. And he said I had something of Romy Schneider about me. Which is a useful reference. N rattles on a lot. And as he was rattling on, Lady Zoa turned to me and said, “If this is a friend, you need to get some new ones.” She was wrong. Because N was more or less right, even if it didn’t sound exactly like he was being supportive. Because like I said to my shrink yesterday on the couch, I felt like it was a catastophe because it wasn’t. Because Caroline doesn’t yet know how to let the catastophe that is her mother and father rolled into one show through her yet. (The height of my outrageous ambition here is Antony singing through his fear of the middle place.) I thought it would be enough to put on a dress for that catastophe to be obvious. It’s not. I have to learn how to spend myself in a dress so that people can hear the catastophe that is breaking me up and giving my body (its hands, its legs, its voice) its rhythm.

We had long, raucous, rhythmic, sex the night after that. In our leather drag. At some point, I told T that his was the name of my expenditure. Which is a little differently intense than being married. It calls up other things to be named.

no i meant like nina simone's 8:46 fantastic "west wind" that her friend miriam makeba asked her to sing. i mean, whoa. holy fuck. so don't be worried.
the sun is coming up right now.

Breathing in the New Year

So you said I need to breathe a little bit more. Or at least to try to a little bit. To see what happens. So that’s what I’m going to do today. While I get some of my shit together, vaccum the apartment, figure out where my work is for the next several weeks, months. Some things just are not going to take the whole year. Which is nice to have. Some projects to make good on right at the start of the year of the ox. Ox. You.

You said, I think, that my stacatto was a little too intense. Or hard to take. I forget your exact wording because I was on my way to the Boileroom bar for water. Like I told my shrink, it was nice to have the distraction of the need for water because I had trouble taking the comment head on. It’s funny because way back when I was just starting to get set up writing you, I worried about the stacatto. That it was too much. Too hard to read. At some point I quit worrying about it and called it “my style.” Your comment made me start worrying again. Which, so long as I can keep writing to you, is no doubt just as well. If it crippled me into silence it would be a problem. But let’s not let that worry cripple us. It can just make us aware. Because, really, here I am writing you again. And I’ll keep coming back. I think we’ve established that by now. Let’s keep coming back.

It’s a question of pace. And also of walking around with someone. Which is one way of saying what we do here. Where there is no path except the one we make by walking. On your side of the ocean, the Animal Collective’s new album is out. There’s a song on it I’ve quoted here before. They’re not calling it “Bearhug” anymore. If I’m not mistaken it must be called “Brother Sport.” Pitchfork says it’s one of the centerpieces of their new album, but that those “obvious peaks would have less resonance if not for the more subtle moments.” Can’t wait to hear those more subtle moments. The album supposedly drops at the beginning of next week here in Euroland. And then T and I are going to go hear them that Friday. In “Brother Sport” they scream out about how “I want to walk around with you.” It’s funny because there was a series of three of four sessions of analysis where I kept citing songs. And that was one of them that came up. Most of them were Antony. But “Brother Sport,” too. And I said I guessed it moved me because there were so many people around in my life that I wanted to walk around with. Which is so much better than what I imagine the opposite would be like. Not wanting to walk around with anyone. But which brings its own amount of pain with it. People you know you want to walk around with but can’t. I was working too much when it came up. So there was that problem. And then so many of you are so far away. So there was that pain of wanting what I couldn’t have. “Jesus,” I said during that session, or another. “All this music that keeps coming up.”

Your entry helps, but can we get a playlist for the Patti show? So much of it is a happy blur to me. I spent most of the concert bobbing along ever so happily with my arms over T’s shoulders pinching his tits and singing the words to the songs I knew. Happy to be there alongside you and the others hearing Patti sing and say what we needed to hear. That is at least a little bit of her undoubtable magic. She says what you need to hear.

Like, I really needed to hear her say, and to hear you repeat in my ear, do not be afraid. Especially when, as my mother has repeated to me several times when we talk about financial news, “This is just the kind of thing that your father was so afraid of.”

I think that for the new year and now that I’m back in Paris and was around people who helped me think, I have two questions that I’m not going to be afraid of asking here and now. The first is: What child? Which I like in particular today because, as I was getting around to letting it formulate into a question, trying to figure out which question exactly it would be, the effort had me singing that Christmas song, “What Child Is This.” Hearing its distorted syntax that would play with my mind as a child. Hearing some of that childhood come back. Asking about the child. I like it, too, because if you insert a comma, it becomes a different and perhaps even more apropos question: “What, Child?” And of course because Kiki’s covered it, caught on that album that was playing on Huron street this last time around.

The second question has to do with the pacing I started off with for this entry. I told you I’m translating some Berlin bits to be published sometime soon here. And there are a couple of translating projects in the wings. The question is related to translation. But it’s also related to what I need to figure out how to say to the world. What bears repeating? By which I mean, what to I need to say again, with more breaths? What haven’t you and lots of others incomparably like you and me heard? What do we need to hear?

And this by way of B. A little gentleness in a world of brutes indeed. Savage and tender. You know the score. Now let’s make sure everyone does. We've got work to do. Remember.

the lady in the bumblebee suit

we stopped in at the bodega to get some beers for dinner.

"hey," a dude, mid-thirties, husky, looked like a longshoreman with his black watch cap, was saying to the owner, who was holding court behind his little glass partition. "HEY." rap rap rap on the thick plastic, "you know those diapers you sold me last week? 1999, man." Dude paused incredulously. "nineteeeeeen-ninety....niiine.." He shook his head, wide-eyed. Way in the back, deep and busy in the liquor freezer case, I almost dropped the beer. S. had dissolved into silent, helpless giggles. Both men laughed, and we paid for our drinks.

***

Finally we made an attempt, "What are you really talking about? What do you mean by 'eradicating craving'?" Aachan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us.

***

Later, after dinner, (fried chicken! beer! fries! side salad. The waitress was really proud of me. She said, "perfect cold rainy night, warm booth, cold beer and fried chicken," she said with an air of approval.) We'd been talking about a wide range of things.

The Iranian executions some months ago "International controversy erupted after Iranian officials executed two gay teenagers who were originally reported to be convicted of homosexuality, however later reports released by the Iranian government after international furor claimed the conviction was for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. The two were hanged July 19."

The photos of the hangings were fucking medieval, devastating, had been viscerally awful and terrifying. you just wanted to throw up. i had to get up and go for a walk and have 8 cigarettes. i wanted to scream. the photos of the two released read as if they were lovers, but later official reports stated they had actually raped another, younger boy, and weren't themselves lovers, and again it's not clear. so the charge wasn't homosexuality, per se.

And the photos, the two teenagers standing on the scaffold crying, were read as lovers, and the heartbroken response was yes. that could happen here, to us. to people i love. However the gay press and blog discussions (which were not about the overwhelming unreliability of what the actual charges were or if they were trumped up or not after the international uproar), and how the whole mess might be initially reported irresponsibly by the gay press here, somehow became for a moment, again, a grand over-reaching irreconcilable clash of civilizations war between cultures and religions (one barbaric, the other vaguely tolerant, east versus west. discussions devolved into incoherent rage against Muslims, Iran, the war in Iraq, god bless America, and fuck ALL of the middle east and there was the very real, awful stench of this could happen to us.

Both teens were convicted by Court No. 19 under sharia law. The teens are identified only as "M.A." and "A.M." Those found having homosexual sex in Iran may face death by either hanging, stoning, cutting in half by a sword, or dropping from a tall building or cliff.

An ISNA report said the couple acknowledged having sexual relations with each other but said they were unaware of laws against homosexuality. wiki

(s. added: "also, there is no anti-gay and lesbian sharia law, at least not exactly. male homosexual sex is illegal according to a hadith or supposed saying of the prophet, but not to my knowledge according to the qur'an, which would be a much stronger law. and i've never heard of anyone in Iran being cut in half with a sword or dropped from a building.")

S mentioned Matthew Limon. in terms of the non-coverage, or muted and sporadic outrage by Gay Rights Groups, no one wanted to go anywhere near the whiff of pedophilia. consensual or otherwise, even though the facts of the case were textbook in terms of how homosexuals are treated as opposed to heterosexuals, and examples that need to be set and so on. maybe i'm wrong about this, but the coverage an attention prior and after the overturn was next to nothing. from the ACLU

***

As an aside, because somehow we ranged into transexuality... (full disclosure: i'm vaguely discomfited by it. i have ishes, based on the one or two FTM's i know, on almost a purely aesthetic level. i.e. unbelievably hot, androgynous girls who transformed themselves into lumpy football players with male pattern baldness. also, it costs a hell of a lot of money to transition. whatever, i'm a judgey asshole. S., however, is completely not. her feeling is wow, i kind of applaud and am fascinated by the total faith in identity... i'll check back with her but i think that's her general feeling. much more expansive and well thought out then mine, certainly.)

Anyway! the point is, "In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there is no religious restriction on corrective surgery....The new religious government that came to be established after the 1979 Iranian Revolution classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing and death under Iran's penal code." Right before Khomeini died his original fatwa, that no one had initially paid attention to, was re-established. In other words, there is nothing in the Qur'an specifically against transexuality, so they are tolerated, or more than just tolerated by the government, since the government pays for the surgery.

(s. went on to say: "and i certainly don't think they're persecuted by the government. (wiki says they are stigmatized by society, but duh. where are they not? the different, and therefore interesting, thing is that the government supports transexuality and pays for the surgery.)
also, as i understand it there is some disagreement/ambiguity, at least in some areas of Iran, about whether you need to get the surgery or can just get the official gender change certificate without the operation. which of course would make all the difference to homosexuals, since you could then marry your lover, if you're into that kind of thing."

"hey did you watch the footage of the "gay on mormon violence" in the castro? what did you think?"

"uhm. pointless."

"well, that's the thing, right? they (mormons) come right out of high school and go straight into 2 years of missionary work. and then they go home and they are RM's. Returning Missionaries. And then they can get married."

"baby, the last time The Lord asked me to do something specifically He wanted me to go out naked in the street and experience aura exchanging hugs and lulz with everyone lucky enough to run in to me. and what do you think i did? true story. He and I had to renegotiate a couple of things after that."

Jennie,
From the heartland comes an interesting take on marriage. The Register has run several editorials more recently along these lines. At a minimum this would help to separate the church from the state and increase momentum for a variety of kinship options - some more elaborate than others. Those options which have been created in the last two decades are now going down the drain as marriage is installed, in Massachusetts large employers told workers to either get married or lose their domestic partner benefits. That's the beauty of equality uber alles - it really means 'more of the same' and cuts off larger vision.
-B.

read Des Moines Register, July 16, 2006, EDITORIAL "Recognize equality through civil unions"

***

Then, because everything is really about me, and The Lord and I still have congress, we were walking home with a little doggie bag for malcolm and i started babbling about coming off meds. i am in total shock how ridiculously hard it's been. Not only has the physical ramp-down been awful, time consuming and violent, but the simultaneous re-acquaintance with the full, rich and really stunning canvas of all emotions all the time, coupled with (plus! bonus) this incredible almost comically kaleidoscope reemergence of my "life-force", overlayed (le sigh) with a kind of uneasy and toddler like confusion and utter personality ego-globalizing of "who am i? what is real about me? what is pervasive? who is i? blah blah blah" i mean, really, it would be hilarious if it weren't so fascinating and scary, i learned a lot on the medication and i wouldn't describe my feelings about it as negative or alienating, it's just been a little difficult. it's like being on a dive in open water and looking up and not seeing the boat for a second. pure panic. and S. said, "oh it's like the broken bowl. all is gone. gone, gone, gone beyond."

WHAT.

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Aachan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.

- Mark Epstein
Thoughts Without a Thinker


oh, that just calmed my shit right down.

“I hate incorrect syntax as if it were a person to beat, incorrect spelling as if it were phlegm spit at me, independently of the person who spit it.

Yes, because spelling is people. Words are complete when both seen and heard. And the splendor of Greco-Roman transliteration dresses language in its severe, regal mantle, through which it becomes a lady, a queen.”

Fernando Pessoa, “The Book Of Disquiet,” translated by Alfred MacAdam, pages 9 and 10 (Exact Change, Boston, 1998).

(via sasha

Bumblebees

So. A while ago on the couch. I was complaining. Sorta. Saying I didn’t know what it was I was looking for in backrooms these days. That I wanted more affect. More relations. Thinking of Foucault. Which I do every once in a while. “Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, ‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?’ The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” My complaints must have been. Oh. Say. A year and a half. Two years ago. Something like that. Definitely before Berlin. Which was a turning point. As you’re all too aware. And as I think you’re aware. It was a turning point because of B. Or at least one way of naming the turning point is to call it B. It’s his fault. Which is also his grace. I’m so happy he’s still around. We have cakes now. On Thursdays. It’s become a little ritual between his office mate E, B and me. Late Thursday afternoon/ early evening. One of us buys cakes. We’re in Paris. So they’re yummy. It’s kinda the end of the week. Definitely the end from my end of things. We eat cake. Drink coffee or tea. At their office close by mine. And chat. About what we’ve seen. At the movies. On stage. In bed. On a screen. In our childhood. And at some point I tap my hands on my legs. And from his swivel chair across the room. B’s head rolls a little bit. And he takes a head-lolling step or two to collapse on the sofa into my lap. And I give him a head massage. Which in general makes him purr. And moan when it’s over. Once he said. “Wow. Can’t wait for next Thursday.” At the end of the massage. Which made me happy. That he was happy. That we ache a little bit. Because the happy moment is over. Until next week. I love B. And I love that I can love and care for B. A little bit. Given the situation. It’s some of the affect I was looking for and not finding in brothels. He still wants somebody to put a foot to his ass to get things done. Someone at night time. Someone he calls a husband when he imagines him. I hope he finds him. If that’s what he wants and needs. And if he figures out how to need and want his husband all at once. Well. I’ll be happy for him. Even if I'll probably have a fit or two getting to that happiness. I’m lucky enough to have a husband. Of a kind. That’s not on a marriage certificate. That’s at least partly why I can see B. And give him a head massage. Purr.

So since that moment complaining on the couch. About the lack of affect in backrooms. I kinda quit going to them. Not on principle. Mind you. Just because. There was a lot going on in bed at home. Actually? T and I never fuck in bed. Or hardly ever. Only when we have guests and the desire arises. Otherwise we fuck on the couch. We spread out this huge white towel that has my father’s initials on it. It was a gift to him from a Saudi prince. Don’t ask. He handed it over to me at some point because it was just too big for him and my mother to know what to do with it. And it sure is handy. Because it covers the couch. Mostly. From wet things that do nonetheless soak through from time to time. Because good sex does that. Makes you. And your sofa. If that’s where you're having it. Wet. Lately we’ve also been fucking on my desk chair. Access to pictures. And? I think it eroticizes writing in kinda cool ways. Though you wouldn’t know it here. Sorry about that. Hopefully this one will be a doozy and we can make up and get on with all this.

Jesus. B is everywhere I try and tell a narrative. Because at the beginning of the month. November 1 to be precise. We went back to a brothel. The Full Metal. Our local standard. Though not the one that’s so practical on a Sunday afternoon because it’s a ten-minute walk away. That one’s called The Bunker. And it’s great for boys who went out for it on a Saturday and didn’t get enough and want to wile away Sunday hours looking for more. That reminds me. Of my main internets sex profile. The headline on it reads. “Ready for more.” I’m serious about that. Though nobody much has noticed yet. B has. In his own way. A week or two before we headed back to the Full Metal. We’d gone shopping with B. After lunch. And somewhere in the margins of a trip to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s recent exhibit in Paris. It was a lovely day. Made B fluctuate in his categorical statement about not fucking with us. That Saturday. He came over for our weekly rotisserie chicken. And then the exhibit. And then shopping. I think it was in that order. And when we went shopping. We went to the local leather store. Because they sell Fred Perry. And B wanted to get a Fred Perry shirt for P’s birthday present. Which he did. And we flirted with the shopkeepers. And various other sundry there for their Saturday shopping. And one of the shopkeepers gave us each passes for a night they sponsor at the Full Metal. Like something like twice a year. And we held onto them. The passes. Saying to our various tricks that we were going.

Like to S. Yes, same S we saw walking down the street with T² and W². A while back now. We like to have S over for dinner. This time around. On November 1. He wanted to have us over for dinner. But we have our market on Saturday mornings. If there’s anything sacred for us. Saturday morning market might really be it. So we had food. A really yummy big fish. And we’re closer to the club than S is. So we conceded that he could make desert. Which he did. Yummy apple cake. Which we ate after our dinner. We still have his cake mould. And I just this second left a message in the chatroom saying we still have it and that it would be a good excuse for us to see each other again. If we do just more of the same. That’s just fine with me. More of the same would be dinner. And then sex. This was the first time the three of us went out for it. Usually we just do it at home. T and S and me. Actually. I’ll anticipate my narrative a little bit. The Monday just after this November 1 dinner and outing. I went to hear S sing. He’s a singer. In an a capella choir. That’s sorta hot shit. Like Orange developed special technology for them to be able to hit the right notes. That kinda hot shit. They were singing a program of contemporary music by a composer named Gérard Pesson. And some of his students. And Ravel. It was pretty great. Even though I had been a bit in a state. All day long. Until I stretched out on the couch again. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Before I do. I wanted to finish off this strand. After the concert. My friend M and I went out for dinner with S. (T was in Denmark for work, so he had to miss out. On the Monday cultural activities at least). M is a music person. Much more so than I am. So he and S had a lot of lovely things to talk about. Which I listened to and learned from. And at some point. I forget exactly how it came up. I think we were complaining about how so much of the sex we’ve been having was disconnected from affect. Or some such. And S said. To the literary people M and I pretend to be. “Isn’t there any literature about innovative ways of linking sexuality and emotion?” And I said. “Yeah, Foucault. And the novel I’m going to write someday.” Which made all three of us smile.

And I cited our little trip to the Full Metal that November 1 as an example. Because as we were heading out. I got an SMS from B. Saying he was still at dinner. But were we already there? I said. No. But we’re on our way with S. Who B finds sexy. T would say it’s because B finds anyone we find sexy sexy. And he’s probably right. To a certain extent. I’d also chatted with G, of G and J-M. Their letters have come up before. In Berlin. T and I chatted with them at the bar. So I had been chatting on-line with G and told him I was going to the Full Metal. And he let me know that he and J-M were going to be there, too. So when S, T and I walked into the Full Metal, I knew that G and J-M were going to be there, that B was coming. Which means. Jesus. That bar was stuffed full of people I have tons of affection for. Different world. Not paradise. Far from it. Not hell either. Probably a kind of purgatory. If we had to get theological about it. Or a labyrinth. If we wanted to follow your suggestion and think it through Greek myth. I mean the space of the backroom is already its own other world. And that night at the Full Metal that other world was itself being othered by the configuration of all these singularities. Like I said on the couch. If a while back I was complaining about the lack of affect in my backroom encounters. Jesus. Given this configuration I was served.

Because of course there were other people around, too. Like V. And N. And then this new fixture on the scene named F. Which also happens to be B’s name. T had been chatting with him on line. And cruising him the one other time we’d seen him out. He’s intimidatingly beautiful. Tattoos all over his body. And tending to prove T’s hypothesis. That B finds whoever we find sexy sexy. They ended up fooling around. Which. As the French say. Put me into all of my states. M’a mis dans tous mes états. For lots of very complicated reasons. As a matter of fact. When I was recounting all this on the couch. I said. Something to the effect of. “Jesus. All of this is so complicated.” Which. A week later? Became. “Jesus. This is so rich.”

I pined all day long the next day. For the fact that B had no doubt found in this F his husband. T found me overwrought. And this is all mixed up, too. As it has been on this site. With grieving for my father. Which makes things really complicated. So all Sunday. I was pining. For lots of things. We went to the movies. And saw a really good but very difficult film. A kind of allegory about a boss who runs a construction site where they make platforms for shipping things and who gives his workers a mosque apparently to allow them to pray on site but also to harness religion for the purposes of his capital. The boss is sexy. And ends up dead. It was a doozy. Turns out. At the movie theater just across the canal. B and F were seeing a murder mystery. I left a message. Saying we could have drinks afterwards if they wanted. They didn’t want. Because they were tired from fucking all night the night before. Which was fine. But didn’t settle the butterflies in my stomach. Do you know Joanna Newsome’s music? She has this song. That I love. Called “Clams, Crabs, Cockles, Cowries.” And there’s an image in it. That I love. Where she sings. “And some bellies ache with many bumblebees./ (and they sting so terribly).” That’s the state my stomach was in. This was actually the night I wrote you about recently. The night when T and I had a conversation that went like this:

T: I just feel like there's so much you feel like you can't tell me.
I:: But right now, there's so much I just can't quite tell myself.
T approaches me and holds me.

So to bring this all back into some kind of full circle. I went with all these bumblebees in my stomach to my shrink that week. And let out a little bit of anger that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. Because really? The ecstasy I’ve been occasionally writing you about? A lot of it. I’ve learned on the couch. Has to do with the fact that before my father died. I was able to remind him of the child I was for him. The child he had forgotten I was for him. The anger was about his having forgotten. Which means I’ve spent a lot of time looking for that child elsewhere. “That child” gets mixed up. In confusing ways. With the child I will not have. Because I’m too busy doing other things. In a world. And in a country. Where it ain’t easy for a faggot like me to adopt a child. And really that’s just fine. But it demands a lot of tears. And it’s complicated.

I started crying some of those tears that day on the couch. Tears over the course of which it was suddenly clear to me. That the only tears worth their salt are ones shed when sadness is mixed with joy.

BTW. We're going over to S's for dinner on Saturday night. Plans were made in the margins of writing this entry.

Historic Day

OK. I know it's a historic day. But I, too, am tired of seeing me listening to Antony on (my birthday) here. Maybe the aphorism I'm about to emit will apply.

The only tears worth their salt are ones shed when sadness is mixed with joy.

Listening to Antony (My Birthday)

Today’s my birthday. I’m 37. Antony’s brand new one is on its first loop of many through my ears. Shhh. I’m listening.

It’s been kinda one of those days. Even though it’s my birthday. Because it’s my birthday? I’m getting ready to go lie down on the couch. Maybe I’ll figure that one out.

If I had to speculate already though. I’d say. It might have something to do with the fact that two dogs have recently made me want to burst out into tears. The first one looked like Camilla. My parents’ last (and aborted) project. I mean she’s still alive. And I hope well somewhere. But the project got abandoned. The other one worked by ricochet. Just a dog. With its head on the ground. Making all that effort to look up at the world walking by him. You know. The way they have their heads down on the ground. And their eyeballs. Rolling up. All that effort. To see things going by.

Then there was the series. Haha. It’s funny. Because in French. Your sets on a muscle machine are a series. So I was in the middle of a series. Triceps. If I’m not mistaken. And there was an article in the paper. About a movie. Called “About War.” And apparently the last half of the movie. Could be resumed in two sentences. By Hélène Cixous. “When I lose my father, I also lose his child. The child I was for him, the one I am for me.” I had to make a big effort to be able to finish the series. Maybe I should have just let it break me down. But I made the effort to hold it together. At a moment when. One could understand. And I could, too. That things might fall apart a bit.

There’s also B. And T. T’s idea. To invite him over for traditional Saturday market roasted chicken lunch. Which was super nice. Then the three of us went to see a little show Tillmans has up here in Paris. B bought me the catalogue for the recent Hamburger Banhof show in Berlin. For my birthday. “Lighter.” It’s called. (Writing that up now, I read that as an injunction. “Make it lighter.”) It’s the one that is full of pictures of his pictures up on the wall at different exhibits. It’s beautiful. It has the smeared-up “photocopy (Barnaby)” on the front hardcover. And the back hardcover is more smeared-up photocopy. Of one of the pictures of an exhibition. I have some major thinking to do about constellations. Because I have to write about these things. For serious real. And. Because the B T W constellation. (By The Way???) After such a lovely Saturday. Entered into static on Sunday. When I had to work translating. Heavy buzzing. B’s still coming over for dinner with M tonight though. I’ll be in good company. And that’s already a lot. “I need another world…”