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Mimesis is normal, particularly in youth, and my only demur is that today's models are, by and large, debasing. In the Forties, American boys created a world empire because they chose to be James Stewart, Clark Gable and William Eythe. By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Could we do it again? Are the private eyes and denatured cowboys enough to serve as exemplars? No. At best, there is James Bond...and he invariably ends up tied to a slab of marble with a blowtorch aimed at his crotch. Glory has fled and only the television commercials exist to remind us of the Republic's early greatness and virile youth.

An abandoned temple by the sapphire creek,
its fallen walls rest on the tangled peak.
I watch roosting birds returning to its trees,
imagining its bell ringing still through the hills.

The barroom had been professionally interior-decorated by a young New York gentleman with the habit of standing with the back of his right hand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar, framed illustrations from La Vie Parisienne, silvered metal tables, and chromium-plated aluminum chairs with scarlet leather cushions.

Sinclair Lewis

It Can't Happen Here

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance if dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man's trouser cuff or the hem of a woman's skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.

John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath

[Keep in mind that Sir Francis is an aging English knight circa 1947, living as an ex-pat in Hollywood, and his dialogue should be read as such. If you can't call up a suitable voice from your own mental soundbanks, go here now and listen to Graham Chapman as Sir Edward Ross--"in thooose dayys I was only a teaboy," in particular--then read on.¹]

Sir Francis Hinsley's momentary animation subsided. He let fall his copy of Horizon and gazed towards the patch of deepening shadow which had once been a pool. His was a weak, sensitive, intelligent face, blurred somewhat by soft living and long boredom. "It was Hopkins once," he said; "Joyce and Freud and Gertrude Stein. I couldn't make any sense of them either. I never was much good at anything new. 'Arnold Bennett's debt to Zola'; 'Flecker's debt to Henley.' That was the nearest I went to the moderns. My best subjects were 'The English Parson in English Prose' or 'Cavalry Actions with the Poets'--that kind of thing. People seemed to like them once. Then they lost interest. I did too. I was always the most defatigable of hacks. I needed a change. I've never regretted coming away. The climate suits me. They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."

Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One

---

¹And if you're even more interested than perhaps you should be, here's a spoiler-filled and not at all nice review of Waugh's novel ("He has so little respect for his subject he doesn't hold himself to a very high standard and ends up making misogynistic comments about American culture that are downright stupid") and the movie made from it. I wasn't as offended as the reviewer, at times, seems to be. I found many little snippets of The Funny scattered throughout. Although snippets of The Funny don't necessarily add up to a good novel, it was an unexpected diversion for a few hours--I found it on my shelf and had no idea how it got there--and I was able to have Graham Chapman's voice in my head for awhile. Always a plus.

"How are you baby? How do you feel? I bring you this--" It was a bottle of cognac. The orderly brought a chair and he sat down, "and good news. You will be decorated. They want to get you the medaglia d'argento but perhaps they can only get the bronze."

"What for?"

"Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic acts you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?"

"No," I said. "I was blown up while we were eating cheese."

Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell To Arms

F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's who.

"Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

"She's lovely," said Daisy.

"The man bending over her is her director."

Gorgeous. Scarcely. Human. Orchid. Four words, so loaded with sensual freight that I had to pause there for a brief moment and unpack just the large, obvious portions of it.

The family Orchidaceae is the largest family of flowering plants, but you know immediately that she's not some perennial epiphyte clinging to a bush in a jungle somewhere. No, she's an exotic cultivar, hand-selected, so carefully tended that she couldn't exist outside of the humid, glass-walled enclosure of the studio. Her director-horticulturalist leans over her, reinforcing the image of care. For me, "scarcely human" and "ghostly" work together to conjure a willowy Jazz-age vision, wreathed with beads, a white face framed by a razor-black bob. One of the most exotic orchids, the birdlike kind with strange, luminescent tendrils that trail down across the pot's soil.

There's another one, later on:

"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?"

My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart.

It's that last phrase that gets me. So much packed into that image, and it's just a throwaway portrait of a flitting character: off-duty, at night, asleep, perhaps snoring, with whomever he loves curled up against him...but who cares? It's hot.

I was discussing the recent realization of my profound literary ignorance, and my determination to remedy it, with a jazz writer friend of mine. She said something to the effect that I was seeking something "to model my writing on." There's nothing here to imitate--the attempt would be foolish. For me the lesson is about the density and rich possibilities of language, of what might be accomplished, if only I can pay enough attention and persevere.

That's not to say I think I can write as well as Fitzgerald. The idea is to absorb what he's done, to set a standard that improves my work more by the mere fact of its existence than the possibility of ever meeting it.

Onward, onward, onward.

Come in with Krup or else. A Krup takeover of the crew and the ship, or so it seemed. He changed the name of the ship from The Enterprise to The Billy Celeste, after a nineteenth-century English man-of-war. Now all Krup had to worry about were his own men, who had used him to get rid of the old C.O., and the old navy with its loathsome pinups and pro stations.

But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We'd seen this character operate, how smoothly he'd hoaxed us into his hanging universe...Tamaghis...the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have deactivated Sirens just to give you the sex trill.

The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-knot ties.

"Might pop myself a month's pay tonight."

"More likely you'll swing the other way."

The having-handed kidding--it's all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise--he's from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror...

"Look at the dong on that kid," says the boy from East Texas.

The kraut kids hardly ever go ashore, because they like to save money. Off duty they loll around in their bunks jacking off and making airplane noises.

William S. Burroughs
Cities of the Red Night

"Oh, there are plenty of people," the Duc used to observe, "who never misbehave save when passion stirs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way that there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before."

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
The 120 Days of Sodom

When I told my friend of the difficulty I was having in trying to bring this tale to an end, a difficulty that far exceeded any I'd known from my previous (literary) births, he said: "That's because you think of it as your last labor before your well goes dry."

He had called on me after a long climacteric "vacation of despair," which he'd spent outside the country, as befits that sort of vacation. Much to my delight, he commented on what he characterized as the "belated rejuvenation" he saw in my demeanor, even though my nimbleness had waned, and my confidence that I'd be able to ascend to the seventieth step of Methuselah's ladder wasn't what it had once been.

"You look," he said, "like someone starting his life all over again."

I said: "Is there any alternative?"

Emile Habiby
Saraya, The Ogre's Daughter

As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself. And Malone was crazier than I. You could tell from his face how deep the disease had eaten into his system. The life of his flesh dwindled, but his spirit ascended like the angels into a perfect love--and yet he was still stuck with his mortal body and his mortal lusts and mortal loveliness: You can't live on the promise of a casual smile which passes while you sit on the stoop waiting for the breeze from the river--demented queen! You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks--no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.

What lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored in his imagination? Or any of us, for that matter. We were lunatics, I'm sorry to say. Our lovers weren't real. Wasn't that finally the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? We were just queens in the end. We would not even speak to most of them--were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there? If that was the case, then we were fools: for being romantics. You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that's why I left--the madness of it all offended me, finally, I wanted a real porch, a real front yard with real live oaks and real flowers in real pots--and that is what I have now, dearie, retired faggot that I am, content with the quiet pleasures of life. Even as I put down this pen (my hand is numb) I can hear the mockingbirds in the gardenia bush outside my window, and there is, croyez-moi, no sweeter sound on earth.

Andrew Holleran,
Dancer from the Dance

A new voice was heard: "How are you all, my dearies! Are we having a good time?"

It was the Divine Bella, Bertram Bellberg, tall and stocky, grinning face and expectant eyes, his enormous chest and back Brillo-ed with hair curlicuing out of his workman's overalls and with a huge felt sunflower smiling from his cleavage. "Fred Lemish, are you having a good time?"

"I don't think so, Bella."

"Well, you simply must, you absolutely must. Life is passing us by. Don't go and fall in love. Bella warned you. Everyone warned you. You just won't listen. Bella believes that what we most want out of life is our good times. As Richard Burton said to Deborah Kerr in Night of the Iguana, there are two levels where we live our lives. The real and the fantastic. We have to disco and drug and fuck if we want to live fantastic! Come, my dearies, let's dance!"

Larry Kramer,
Faggots

Spencer Dew was gracious enough to grant me permission to reprint this piece from his new collection, Songs of Insurgency. I chose it because of its blog-length brevity and because, for me, it achieves what Edgar Allen Poe called "unity of effect." That sort of thing is subjective, of course. You can read my brief review of the entire collection after the jump.

The Sea Beneath
By Spencer Dew

An engine gives out above what were once the oceans of Kansas, what once swarmed with plesiosaurs and serpentine proto-alligators, what were once thick with fish the size of trailer homes, seas of several million giant teeth.

You try to explain all this to the stewardess, but you are, to begin with, a little drunk, plus the scene has its own quality of chaos. You are up high, and the seatbelt, she reminds you, is more than a pure formality.

Smoke occludes the starboard side. It is like a storm rolling through you, the whole tube of the airplane threatening to burst, to snap and split and spill you all out over the dry flatland, the extinct sea bottom, over all that space once crawling with trilobites, their sectioned armor rippling, all that empty distance once shimmering with rainbow-tone, warm-water coral.

The passengers groan and weep, pray, vomit into waxed paper bags. Someone faints and someone else starts screaming, something rather simplistically phrased, an expression of desire not to die.

Say you were an expert on ancient worms and a few other varieties of colonial organisms that once clustered around thermal vents along the cracks in the planet's crust, underwater, millennia ago. This was your identity, to a large degree, studying the tracks and tunnels, mostly microscopic, in stone, stone that was, in turn, once, long ago, near cracks in the ocean crust, fathoms deep. Say this was you, in a flipbook of instant retrospection, a slideshow of memories.

Here you are, examining fossilized colonies from former thermal pockets, rock which, then, lived, thriving and competing, breeding and feeding, growing, dying, and being devoured...

Now here you are, again, still now, yourself, in one such similar tunnel, spiraling in an uneasy slope of descent, at too fast a speed, toward Kansas, far below...

You try to tell the stewardess that you just can't tell if it's ironic or not, but something has hit her on the back of the head and she flops down, all bones and connective tissue.

Something smells like urine, very close.

You think about time, its mechanics, how it moves, how instants accumulate. Under pressure, they turn to something solid, compacted and reduced, an idea. Or, in the same way, they crush to powder, erasing under their own weight.

Some moments you do not remember your name, and it makes no difference. The screaming fades out, fades back in again.

Always, the ground of Kansas has waited.

Maybe you think like this, backward, to long before the draining, before the dry times, before the lumbering land beasts or men in hunting packs, before the native rhinoceros or the double-wide prefab homes, before the strip malls and titty bars and pickup trucks or sheriff's department prowl cars that pause and pull over on the gravel shoulder of an industrial access road to look up in wonder at what must be an angel, streaking, white-hot and radiant, across the sky, to arrow into the earth.

Songs of Insurgency [Amazon]
Vagabond Press, 2008
Find Spencer Dew online at www.spencerdew.com.

The Sea Beneath first appeared in thieves jargon.


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Almost a century later, executive staff minutes for November 13, 1958, recorded: "Discussed dresses and pants for next summer. Dr. Hoerster said we are short of funds and we could get some material of cheaper qualities such as seersucker or denim."

Finally it was Rog and me alone, late at night in the quiet, the way it had been all summer. Still I would not cry, because I wouldn't let him hear sorrow. I spent all my own endearments-my little friend-and sat till four o'clock. When I'd kissed his forehead I could still smell the freshness of the shampoo. I called Sam at four and said I was ready to leave, and we talked awhile about whether I needed to be there for the actual moment. I didn't, I don't know why. I clipped a lock of his hair, which got lost in the chaos of the following day. I slipped off his father's sapphire ring, which the nurse had taped to his finger. I said what half good-bye I could. You're the best, I whispered as I walked out the door, what I always said when I left his room at night.

I drove home trying to beat the dawn and knew it would not even start until morning. Waking teaches you pain. The parents were in the front bedroom, so I took a Dalmane and curled up in Roger's bed, where I still sleep every night because he is nearer there than anywhere else in the house. When the phone rang at six I drifted out of bed and went into the darkened study. Bernice was standing in the hallway door, and we held each other as the machine answered the phone. After the beep, a voice said: "This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died at 5:42 A.M. this morning, October twenty-second." Bernice and I hugged each other briefly, without a word, and I swam back to bed for the end of the night, trying to stay under the Dalmane. Putting off for as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone-this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do.

Paul Monette,
Borrowed Time