Rereading Holleran

One of my copies--I have two, of course--of Andrew Holleran's debut novel Dancer from the Dance bears an inscription which reads: "To Ray and Mark, Christmas 1978. From Curt & Jim." It's one of my favorite books, as objects go, for the love, the intimacy that shines through it--from one gay couple to another, written in the year that I was born. I wonder about those four men sometimes, about their togetherness and maybe their breakups. I wonder if they are even still alive.

I was inspired to re-read the novel, having recommended it to a friend in Paris, and later realizing that I hardly remembered it, save for the general direction of the plot, and the notion that it was perhaps the first book that I read after I moved to New York, and now, nearly ten years later, perhaps it was time to see how things might have changed.

I've written my own novel now, about processing violence in a culture where you feel like the prey--where you are the prey--and, ultimately, about learning to recognize yourself. So when I started reading Dancer from the Dance again, I was surprised, shocked rather, to see how much the novel had informed my early work on the book, my thinking about it, and maybe even--dare I say it--shades of character, and narrative.

Take this, from the opening pages:

Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don't want to know WHAT THEY DO.....And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl. (Or a boy's love for his DOG--if you could tell that story again, this country would make you rich as Croesus!)

And a few sentences later:

"So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them?

I must have taken this as a challenge, an immediate directive. Because I've now written a violent and/or tragic novel of men who do Other Things, and when asked by friends and boyfriends what I really planned to do with my novel, as uncommercial as it is, I basically recounted this same speech about a boy's love for a girl. And lord knows (somehow) the goddamn Marley and Me sold plenty of copies.

(None of these speeches actually answered their question. But what else can one say, except: I wrote this thing. It came out of me. I had no choice in the matter.)

It's fascinating to read a gay novel about desire--is there any other kind?--that takes place before AIDS. But something about the novel isn't sitting right with me.

I have, on another shelf, Larry Kramer's Faggots, published in the same year. Kramer's view of homosexuals in NYC at the time is far less romantic, and yet how is it that I still believe Kramer loves gay men more than Holleran does. That he loves being gay, everything about it, the beauty, the tragedy, the mundane. Take this, from a speech he gave in November 2004: "I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all these things." 'Nuff said.

But sometimes, when I look at all of Holleran's work together, the novels stacked against each other on my shelf, as beautiful, as important, and as singularly enjoyable as they are....they all feel somewhat like an apology. I can't help but feel the regret in between the lines. With Grief, Holleran's most recent novel, I think he finally shakes off that pity, that sad world of loss in which all the other of his books float. Ironically, the book is about loss and death and sadness.

I can't remember how Dancer ends, except I know what is given to the reader on the first few pages: that the narrator is going to clean out Malone's Fire Island apartment after he has died. Or disappeared.

So, I read on.

Nominated!

From Boys to Men, the anthology in which my essay "Inheritance" appears, has been nominated for a Lamda Literary Award for Best Anthology. Hooray! Big Time Congratulations to Rob & Ted.

It's really quite an amazing collection, including great essays by Alex Chee, Joe Jervis, Mike McGinty, Eric Karl Anderson, and, of course, many others.

You can buy your own copy here.

The Unexpected

I have a friend in Chicago who told me that she's started painting. Some time ago, her apartment was burglarized--thankfully, she said, the only thing they took was the laptop, which, in my case, would be the pinnacle of horror--but when the policemen were there writing up the report, they paused to comment on her new work. How strange it was, she wrote to me, that the first people to see the paintings were strangers, and she hadn't even given herself enough time to sit with the idea.

I'm always interested in the combination of faith and uncertainty that artists must put up with. Or, rather, maybe uncertainty is part of faith--that's what faith is, right? Either way, you have to trust yourself, trust your process, and trust your instincts. All of this, of course, in the back of your mind as you push the paint across the canvas, or pull the clay up from the table. Or push the keys to make the words. There really is no difference. Meanwhile, our self-doubt is also creeping in from all sides, pooling like water anywhere it can collect.

Another friend of mine, who's now living in Seattle, was showing me some pieces from this new series--Shannon's a photographer, but not always. She works in all sorts of media, and is even devising a massive community-centered event on her home street in Brooklyn which, if it ever actually moves through the urban bureaucracy, could manage to really amaze. This new series she's doing--it's pictures of films taken with her cell phone camera. Only it's a million times more interesting than that sounds. The grainy-ness, the removal, the intimacy and immediacy. Tonight, over my fish and chips and her bison burger at Fanelli's, she showed me a few of them. "I can't decide what size they should be?" she kept saying. "Bigger," I said. "Eight by ten." Then I had to clarify. "Feet. Eight by ten feet." I always want photographs to be huge.

Last weekend, Kip and I end up watching a new documentary about Sally Mann, "What Remains," and I'm loving watching her figure things out. I love watching her look. Seeing the way she looks at something, framing it, cropping it, creating focus.

How is it that the art-struggle is so universal, and yet so personal? So mystical? What is the universe trying to tell me by giving me all this evidence?

Hawk vs. Squirrel

I've spent the last week doing all sorts of stuff that has shifted my attention away from the blog--some interesting, some less so. But the as-yet-secretly-named second novel has been tugging at me a bit, and for a time it was too impossible to try to do both. The language was too fragile to start working here, too. So I just didn't.

Among those other strange behaviors--not writing, that is--were: digging my van out of the snow piled up around the front end by the city's plows; writing letters to illustrious photographers hoping they'll donate something for the upcoming Circus Amok benefit performance; building a database for VUE, watching those Oscars, and riding the B61 back and forth from Brooklyn to Queens, listening to the polish women talk about whatever it is they talk about after doing their shopping.

At the market on Saturday, a hawk was having face-off with a squirrel--and after a good 15 minutes of everyone staring up at the drama in the trees, fifty or so photographers clammoring up lampposts to get a better shot, and more cell phone cameras pointed at the pair than should be allowed, they simply decided to go their separate ways, and no blood was rendered. Another farmer reminded me that those Discovery Channel nature shows take days to shoot, and include hours and hours and hours of that kind of interaction--nothing. The money shot is harder to come by. So to speak.

The A.C.

The night before Kip and I drove to Atlantic City I had a dream about Lucinda Williams. I've been listening to her new record, West, for about a week now. In the dream, Lucinda was having a problem with her cell phone and asked me to see if I could do something about it. "Call the service provider," she said. Turns out, the service provider was HBO--something that could happen in a dream--and turns out only her brother has the passcode to get the phone to start working again. So I call the brother, suss out the passcode and Lucinda gets back on her tour bus and hits the road.

Casinos are like that, too, if you don't know what you're doing--and I don't. The rules are suspended. Everything leans toward the possible, not the impossible, and--if you look for it, if you want it--every tiny moment is filled with symbolism, foreshadowing and superstition.

I didn't want to touch the slots at first. They looked filty, coated in a waxy combination of cigarette smoke, alcohol and body grease. How many disgusting fingers have grazed this Bet Max button? Television's got nothing on them, I thought, watching the lines of old people,
tethered to their machines by a money card on a leash, gaze into the video screens, waiting for the triple 7, the double diamond, the whatever it was--Star Wars, Wheel of Fortune, I Love Lucy, you name it--to line up and deliver them from their misery. Rather, from their mediocrity.

Eventually, we sat ourselves in front of a nautical-themed slot and watched our $20 disappear. We played another $5 each at the Star Wars machines, and on that one I fared better, winning almost my five bucks back, before losing it again. I'd figured out how they worked by watching other players--how many betting lines, how many credits to bet--though there couldn't be any strategy.

How could it be that everyone was so old? They slid their wheelchairs up to the slots and, some of them, loaded $100 bills one after the next into the mouths of the machines. The card tables were filled with younger people, though not many of them in their 30s, and basically none of them in their 20s. Do we just not have money to gamble? Las Vegas has succeeded in transforming itself into a vacation spot for families, for middle class people who want to be entertained, as well as people who are itching with some streak of wildness that they understand can be expressed, then left behind, in Vegas. But Atlantic City is still just casino after casino, two miles of boardwalk and millions, billions of dollars.


On our way out of town, we visited Lucy the Elephant, an early example of zoomorphic arcitecture. We bought tee-shirts and took pictures. And, like in a dream, Kip used his Photoshop skills to put us in the same picture, even though we took separate shots of each other.

"Oh," I said later, "we didn't visit the Trump Plaza." Kip mumbled something from the passenger seat. "How is it different," I asked. Kip said, "Everything is sort of gold and combed over."

It wasn't a horrible trip, but it was eye-opening. I enjoyed watching the blackjack tables, the solid, fluid movements--the same way I like to watch machines stamp out sheet metal that is to become cooking pots, or a flurry of Coke bottles being filled by a series of lightening-fast spigots. Once I had really figured out each movement, each subtle signal to the dealer, it wasn't as exciting. And after it became a game, not a machine, I was ready to move along.

The Frock.com

My new co-worker Alice was recently moved from one computer to another, and I ended up with her old one. Lucky for me, Alice left all her bookmarks here, and so I can casually peruse all the things that interested her. And, thus, many of them have become interesting to me. Among them, are a vintage dress company called The Frock.com.

They specialize in gorgeous gowns from the Victorian and Edwardian era, WWI and the mid-century, special couture pieces, as well as a random collection of items from the personal collections of celebrities, including Joan Crawford, Liza Minnelli, Sophia Loren and Eva Gabor.

I was taken by this one in particular: a hostess gown which belonged to Lucille Ball. At $800 it's a steal.

Labels!

Thanks to the new Blogger, I have added labels to all the previous posts. It's the kind of thing that I'd like to do to my entire life: categorize, divide, make sense of the chaos. For example, if I happen to sit down at someone else's computer and start pouring through their iTunes, and it's not exactly the way it dammed should be, with blank spaces and inconsistent genres, I just about want to kill them. Or spend the next seven hours fixing everything. Track numbers and the correct album names, etc.

Posts can now carry a tag like "fabulousness," "greenmarket," "art-making," "movies," "joan," (as in Ms. Didion,) and a bunch of other stuff. Blogger tells me that I've labeled the majority of the posts with "writing," "NYC," and "fabulousness," which should give you some idea about what I do here most of the time. Strangely, "cats" and "sex" appear quite infrequently.

If you click on any of the tags you will be taken to a new page that shows only posts, and all posts, that relate to that tag. Got it?

Also -- the dentist this afternoon was fine. Success, if you want to call it that. So now this post also carries the labels, "medical adventures" and "ambiguous."

And One More Thing

Oh, I forgot to tell you this part of the dentist story.

When I asked him, "Is my tooth going to just fall out?" He said, "You can trust your roots." The roots of my teeth, he meant. But I thought it was good advice for most everyone.

Unless you know better.

Getting on Board

I visited the dentist today, the first time I have been since, well, let's just say it's been a while. As any of my ex-boyfriends, friends, parents, cohorts, and current boyfriend can tell you, my stubborn stalwartness is perhaps my most endearing charm. Right? Right? However, in this case, my decision to simply "go when it becomes a problem" has caused me more anxiety than need for an actual emergency dental intervention--and therefore I found myself staring for 21 minutes at x-rays of my teeth, and subsequently counting ceiling tiles this afternoon in midtown, while waiting on the doctor.

They look perfect, I thought. See, no worries. I'm speaking of my teeth here. How they appear exactly like a dental x-ray should look: black and white, cartoony. Needless to say, Dr. Dentist was able to see, upon closer inspection, some areas that needed his attention. (Strange how narrating your medical adventures can so easily, if given in to the slightest of temptations, become low-brow erotica.) So now I have to go back next week for the actual cleaning, and perhaps some resin composite. No big deal, right? Some pain, some boredom, heaps of anxiety and finally a clean bill of health.

The temptation to lie to the doctor is there--to say, oh I brush thoroughly three times a day, and floss more than only when I think about it, even though he's there staring down into your mouth. In some ways, it doesn't matter what you tell him--the evidence is clear. It's like people who clean before the maid comes. Or some twisted version of Stockholm Syndrome.

"We'll take care of it, knock that stuff out of there," says the doctor. "In no time we can get you on board." To have been as absent, as aloof and as hidden behind his glasses and face mask as he was, he was remarkably soothing. Or maybe this is what I projected onto him. (There's that Syndrome again. Maybe it's not coincidence that I was once Elizabeth Smart for Halloween.) As soon as it became clear that I wasn't going to ask any more strange questions, ("Should I eat normally?" I said. "Normally?" he asked back, as if I meant to smash my breakfast into a paste and spread it across my pores,) he shook my hand and proclaimed that it was "good to meet" me.

I'm not looking forward to the actual procedure--what crazy fuck does? But I'll go through with it--grumpy and obstinate and sure that they're wrong about everything. It's quite childish, really. But dammit, that's just the kind of guy I am.

PS - Special thanks to Kip for rushing to my side last Saturday when I was sure that I was moments away from dentures.

Sync or Swim

Dear loyal GrammarPiano readers,

My amazing friend Cheryl Furjanic (creator of the glamorous (and infamous) BarTalk and P.R.I.I.D.E. shorts) is making a huge push to raise $15,000 to complete her newest documentary feature, Sync or Swim.

Sync or Swim is the first-ever behind-the-scenes documentary about the United States Synchronized Swimming team. This feature-length documentary will shed light onto this lesser-known Olympic sport as it tracks the team's journey to their bronze medal wins 2004 Olympics. The film will lead us through the happiness and heartache of the Olympic trials process, the rigor of synchronized swim training, the creative collaboration behind the choreography and costume design, one swimmer's struggle to overcome a near fatal car accident and the sacrifices that must be made on the road to becoming an Olympic athlete.

You can view the Sync or Swim trailer and watch other clips, here. Cheryl's work is insightful, hilarious, completely glamorous, and I have immense faith in her as an artist (and friend.) If you can, please click on over HERE, and make a donation.