New Year’s, 2013

Well here it is a new year.  What a surprise <grin>.

But time is always moving onwards, and we move with it.  New Year’s is always significant and memorable for me, probably because I’m always on vacation—paused—when it comes upon me.

I want to take a moment to just be aware of myself and take a deep breath before plunging into this new (by our calendar) year.  What might it hold?

My Brazilian friend asked for one word to describe what people would like in 2013.  I said “determination.”  That’s it, I suppose:  A more sustained focus on what I intend to do.

I intend to write more consistently.  I intend to apply myself more consistently to the writing projects I’ve had in mind for some time:  Poems I’ve thought of but maybe not written down, or maybe only sketched.  Novels (I currently have four novel-length manuscripts, and ideas for four more).  Essays (particularly one about Attraction).  I’ve made notes and sketches for many things, but not followed through.

I intend to pursue publication more consistently.  I’ve always been more interested in writing than publishing.  And maybe writers should be.  But I want my work to be available to the public.

I intend to be more aware of how I interact with other people.  I’ve just lost a friend I value highly, for reasons obscure to me (apparently they didn’t value me highly—or perhaps I was too “high-maintenance” from their perspective?)

I intend to treat my day job with more respect.  Sometimes, I confess, I don’t understand what motivates the people I work for—but I intend to try harder and contribute more.

And finally (as I sit here with a sore throat and a slight fever):  I intend to take care of myself, physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I want to remember to do that.  For myself, and for my friends.

Blessings to all, as we plunge into 2013!

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).

“Find the Significant!”

When South Bay Writers was planning its last writing conference (which was put off because the economy wouldn’t support it, back in 2010) we thought we would build the conference around the theme “Why Do You Write?”  Not a bad idea—and I’ve been asking myself ever since, “Why do you write?”  I suppose different writers would give different answers to that question.

  

Some people might write to share ideas and experiences.  We’ve had some peak experience; or we’ve had an idea that seems to be important and possibly even original.  No one else seems to have noticed it, so we’d like to spread it around.

Or something has happened to us, and we think a friend or a relative might be interested in it.  Or we think it’s something important that other people ought to know.  We want to tell them; we try to explain.

Maybe we hope to improve the world—society, the nation—again, we try to explain.

Or, more mundanely, we want to become rich, we want to become famous.  We think we can cook up something entertaining, something enjoyable—and lure people into paying to enjoy it.  We’re hoping to make money.

We may write to give ourselves excitement; or we may chase adventure in hopes of writing about it and capturing the excitement for people who, for whatever reason, prefer to remain at home reading rather than first-hand-experiencing.

Maybe our writing is therapeutic, cathartic.  Somehow, it helps us get something unhealthy out of our system.  Perhaps after we’re done, we’ll arrive at a sense of feeling healed and whole; and never feel the need to write again.

Maybe we want to leave our family and friends with something to remember us by, after we’re gone; a consolation, after our death.

Maybe we simply want to understand ourselves better, or life better, or people better.

So many possibilities!  Lately I look at possible projects and wonder:  Which one do I choose? 

In spite of propensity to fictionalize, I dwell on past and possible future experiences:  For example, the holidays coming up.  I think of how I will interact with friends and family during the coming holiday season.  I think of places I’ve lived or visited; my experiences there; how to describes these things to other people I know.  I think of movies or books or music that mean something to me, and wonder whether it is possible to convey the significance these things hold for me.  I think of traumas I’ve suffered, and I think “What is significant?  Find the Significant—in the Past, in Art, wherever.  Find the Significant and convey it.  Do it—somehow! Do it!”