July 14, 2009

Clancy Martin Tells the Truth Even When He Lies

This interview originally appeared on STOP SMILING Online

A Canadian boy drops out of high school to join his brother in Texas as a fine jewelry salesman. He becomes embroiled in the lies, cheats, vice and deceptions that permeate the industry, and certain parts of him become crushed and twisted, although he emerges a wiser man. This is the story of Bobby Clark, the fictional narrator of How to Sell (FSG), but it’s also the story of author Clancy Martin. The degree to which the narrator’s often-repugnant confessions correlate to the actual experiences of his creator is unclear, although Martin would probably tell you if you asked — he’s admitted on record to drug addiction, suicide attempts and defrauding customers (which, it seems, are the details most interviewers are interested in).

How to Sell, Martin’s first novel, is fast and coarse, like a stiff brush scrubbed quickly across a shiny surface. Stylish yet unadorned sentences guide the reader through a plot involving prostitutes and grand theft, but the real action is Bobby Clark’s descent from Canadian naiveté into the American abyss. Some of the novel’s best parts are the funny ones, like this description of an old, rich Vietnamese man trying on an expensive watch: “He had slender, muscular wrists and the elegant Patek looked right on him. The pale platinum belonged on his leathered skin. He could see himself feeding his enemies to the crocodiles in the moat behind his mansion.”

Clancy Martin is the chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he works on 19th and 20th century European philosophy and the ethics of advertising and selling. He has translated books by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and is at work on a translation of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. He has philosophy books forthcoming from FSG and Oxford University Press — titled Love, Lies and Marriage and The Philosophy of Deception, respectively — and is completing his second novel. He is also writing a memoir that is being serialized in the literary annual Noon, and has written articles in the New York Times, the London Review of Books and Harper’s.

I spoke with Martin as he drove north with his wife toward Oklahoma City from Austin, where he had just completed the final stop on the US book tour for How to Sell. He had recently appeared in Dallas-Fort Worth, where he is still a silent part-owner, along with his brother, of five jewelry stores.

Stop Smiling: How was the Dallas event? Considering the book is set in Dallas-Fort Worth, was that stop different than the others on your tour?

Clancy Martin: I was slightly nervous about it, but the people who came were all these very loving older, wealthy female customers of mine, and several wore jewelry that I had designed for them. So, yeah, it was really nice.

SS: Were you nervous that someone would show up whom you had said something about in the book?

CM: I was nervous that, given the content of the book, there might be some customers who would show up and say, “I want you to look at this and make sure you didn’t cheat me” — that kind of thing. But there was absolutely none of that whatsoever.

SS: Do you feel like you maybe dodged a bullet?

CM: Yeah, I really do. I was pleasantly surprised.

SS: In regard to the memoir you’re working on: Since How to Sell is a fairly autobiographical book, I was wondering what the differences were between writing an autobiographical novel and writing an actual memoir?

CM: The big difference to me is that, when you’re writing a memoir, you have to be as true to your memory as memory will let you be. The nice thing about a novel is that, in a novel, you can still be writing everything you know that’s true about your interior life, but you can use whatever sort of fictional creation you want to try to depict that. I think it’s why Aristotle said that poetry was closer to truth than history, because history, at the end of the day, is concerned only with fact, but poetry is concerned with making things more profound. I think that fiction allows you to do more exploration of human psychology than memoir does. You make the greatest catalog of facts you want and you’re still never going to capture what it is like to be human.

SS: How much does your background in philosophy inform your fiction? Do you find yourself trying to work philosophical ideas into a narrative?

CM: For me, especially because I’m trained as a philosopher, and I’ve never had any training as a writer of fiction, the challenge was to try to keep the philosophy from taking over the narrative. In How to Sell, I was always trying to bury the philosophy inside the narrative, rather than have the philosophy take over. Especially because it was my first novel, I wanted it to be as fast as possible — I was concerned with pace more than anything else — so I kept having to put all the philosophy underneath. For example, Aristotle has four different types of liars, so I wanted to make sure all four different types of liars appeared in the novel. And then Aristotle makes a distinction between lying and breaking a contract, and I wanted to make sure that was in the novel. And then Kant has a very famous argument about why lying is always wrong, and I wanted to make sure that was in the novel. And Augustine gives this long catalog of all the different kinds of lies that people tell, and I wanted to make sure that an example of every single one of those kinds of lies was in the novel. And then I was also very concerned about Nietzsche’s analysis of the appearance-reality distinction, and why, at the end of the day, it doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny because of reasons about self-deception, and so I wanted to make sure that was in the novel. But, again, I wanted to get all that stuff in the novel because these are the things I work on in my philosophical work, but I knew that if I wrote that book it would just be this deadly boring book that no one would want to read.

SS: You’re obviously concerned with the idea of deception, but at the same time How to Sell is very forthright — its narrator admits to all sorts of questionable behavior. And since it’s an autobiographical work, so do you, to a certain extent. How does this relationship between forthrightness and deception play out for you?

CM: The concern all along in How to Sell was to try and have basically two Bobbys. There’s Bobby the narrator, who is telling the story, and who is trying to tell the story with as much sincerity and frankness as possible. And then there’s the other Bobby — Bobby the character — who’s actually experiencing these things. It’s Bobby the character who’s telling all the lies, getting drawn into all the deception, who’s getting increasingly confused by this world of trickery that he’s buying into. And Bobby the narrator is confessing all of this with complete openness and frankness. Part of what I hoped the reader would see is that the Bobby at the end of the book, after having gone through all of this, was the only person who could be in a position to confess all this with frankness and sincerity. He had to go through all that before he could have the sincerity, the frankness, the self-knowledge to be able to see through all of the bullshit that he had created for other people and for himself. That’s an insightful question because that was my most important operating premise — precisely that distinction between frankness and deception.

SS: You’ve translated books by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, but you’ve also said that Georges Bataille is one of your primary influences. Bataille wrote philosophy and fiction, as well as anthropology. I was wondering what about Bataille impresses you so much.

CM: Certainly Bataille was a hero of mine for the reasons you just mentioned. I can’t compare myself, obviously, with these guys, but the great European intellectuals I admire of the 20th century didn’t just write philosophy. They were philosophers, but they were also interested in psychology, and they wrote fiction, and many of them wrote plays, and they wrote criticism for newspapers, and they did all these things. I’ve always admired that, and I’ve always thought that the humanities in this country would be so much stronger if we demanded that of our humanities professors. Because what is “research,” really, in philosophy? It’s a joke. What you’re doing is writing, and if you’re writing, then don’t you have an obligation to write to many different audiences, and not to write to just five other guys who are interested in the question of individuation, or something?

What I think I learned specifically from Bataille more than from any other writer is that the secret of doing your best work is asking yourself your most painful questions. He thought that the deeper the level of your confession, the more ferocious you could be in terms of your self-interrogation, the more intimate you could be with the ugliest aspects of yourself, the better your writing would be. We can all only do this so much, but I really try to follow that discipline. When I talked to [Noon editor] Diane Williams about my work — like, “Why did you pick these weird jewelry stories?” — she always said the same thing: “It was because there was this anguish of self-laceration and this anguish of confession in them, and that was the voice that was driving. The jewelry was just a vehicle.” So, I think that’s what I learned from Bataille. He wasn’t afraid to ask himself any question.

SS: You’ve published in every issue of Noon since 2006. I find the stories in there comparable to anything that you’d find in Harper’s or The Paris Review or The New Yorker, but outside of serious literary circles it’s relatively unknown.

CM: I agree. I think that the stories in Noon can go toe to toe with stories in the very best places publishing short fiction in the world. And I know a lot of very smart people who hold the exact same opinion, including people high up in the world of publishing. I think in the fullness of time, Noon will be much more widely known than it is today, when people look back on this period of literary history. Diane Williams has an incredible ear, and she has an eye for all different kinds of stories. This is a cliché, but I think she has this kind of ear for authenticity. If there’s one thing that she taught me — writing for Diane was really my MFA — it’s how to carve all of the bullshit out of my writing, all of the literary pretension, any kind of fake word, any kind of cheap trick, anything that didn’t sound original.

SS: There’s a recurring theme in the reviews of your book, which is reviewers feeling like it’s fitting or clever to mention how much they think the book is going to sell. There’s a New York Times review that reads, “All in all, it’s a winning combination. How To Sell will sell.” Newsweek had something very similar: “Selling How To Sell probably won’t be too hard.” And there are others. Do you think this is an unfair angle to take when talking about the book — almost characterizing it as something that’s not only about slick salesmen, but that’s also sort of a slick, flashy product in and of itself?

CM: I totally agree with you, of course. When I wrote the book, I was just praying that it would find a publisher. I remember telling my wife, and she remembers this, too, at the time we owed twenty thousand dollars on our car, and our dream was that we could get somebody to pay twenty thousand dollars for the book so that we could pay off our car. And then when people come out and say, “Oh, what slick packaging, blah blah blah.” I mean, it’s total bullshit. And it’s also just this incredibly superficial observation because, as you say, it’s like, “Oh, won’t this be cute? Isn’t this cute, coy remark?” Reviewers see How To Sell: A Novel, and think it’s going to be so clever to say that this is about how to sell a novel, when, in fact, it’s about the most facile, superficial, idiotic remark you could possibly make.

SS: You could characterize How To Sell as sort of an exposé on the jewelry business. Did you intend it to be that?

CM: Well, I was writing what I knew. I didn’t intend it precisely to be an exposé on the jewelry business, but I started writing the stories when I was still in the jewelry business, and a lot of the stories in one way or another found themselves re-written into the novel. Then, the more I got into the novel, the more I realized that the jewelry business was kind of a metaphor for something I was trying to say about a particularly confused idea of the American Dream. It wasn’t just for autobiographical reasons that I made the narrator a Canadian. It’s also because a lot of Canadians have this crazy idea of what it is to be an American, like you’re just going to go to America and, like all Americans, you’re going to deal in all these shady practices and then, like all Americans, you’re going to get rich. Canadians are always sort of congratulating themselves, patting themselves on the back, saying, “Oh, well, we’re not Americans because we don’t care about money, so we’re really honest,” and blah blah blah.

SS: It seems funny to me that people are surprised about the kind of corruption that goes on in the jewelry business. I always figured that most retail is like that. Do you think the jewelry business is any more corrupt than any other type of high-end retail?

CM: No, I really don’t. I was recently having lunch with a guy who owns a very successful hedge fund in Texas, and he’s a real honest guy — they were never into derivatives or sub-prime mortgages and all these other things because they were just really smart, honest guys. I started telling him about some of the latest scams in the jewelry business that I had learned about when I was out in Vegas writing this article for Harper’s, and he stopped me and said, “Clancy, you’re not talking about the jewelry business, you’re talking about the world. It’s not the industry — it’s business itself.” And he said it as though he were talking to a child, like, “Haven’t you realized this yet?” Of course, it is in a way funny that people are like, “Oh my God! Look at the jewelry business!” when, in fact, it’s this way in every industry.

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Filed under Writing about writing -- mine and others', amazing people, journalism, nonfiction

July 7, 2009

This is the second time this week that this dumpster has caught on fire

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June 30, 2009

The Cardboard Universe

(This review originally appeared on STOP SMILING Online)

The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank
By Christopher Miller
(Harper Perennial)

Reviewed by Nathan Martin

The Cardboard Universe is ultimately a sad book. Sure, the novel is loaded with jovial shenanigans and charming characters whose shortcomings Christopher Miller wiggles with a comedic touch into the soft, warm nook between our funny bones and hearts. Its purposeful nerdishness is playfully kitschy when it doesn’t work and endearing when it does. But beneath the myriad layers of deft quips and sincere wit, it’s a story of the sad lives of sad men who barely, if at all, survive to tell their tales.

Phoebus K. Dank is a fictional science fiction writer modeled more than loosely off of Philip K. Dick. Like Dick, Dank is a neurotic paranoiac who lives in Northern California, anxiously staggers through bouts with drugs, a series of failed marriages, and maddening obscurity despite the onslaught of inventive books he churns out. Also like Dick, Dank enjoys a small, fervent following of admirers who indignantly proclaim his genius in the face of a literary establishment that responds with utter disregard. Among this band of Dankians is Bill Boswell, an academic who’s devoted his life’s work to Dank’s, acts as Dank’s live-in biographer, and is the co-narrator of The Cardboard Universe, an exhaustive compendium of all things Dank.

Boswell begins writing this authoritative Dank text the day after Dank is murdered in his sleep. Owen Hirt is the primary suspect — a failed poet, enemy of Boswell, and longtime friend of Dank’s who resented the SF writer’s relative success. The book notes major Dank works, important people and events in Dank’s life, as well as conditions and habits — like “Agoraphobia,” “Mental Exercises” and “Inventions” — that are intrinsic to an understanding of Dank. Along the way, Boswell describes the process of writing the book, which includes early on the addition of a co-commentator: Hirt, who files his entries via email from undisclosed locales abroad. Hirt and Boswell are the two people most familiar with Dank, but hold diametrically opposed opinions of him: Boswell lauds the author at every turn, while Hirt never misses a chance to disparage him. This back and forth, which propels much of the novel’s action, is a debate that runs the gamut of arguments both for and against science fiction. In the process it unveils the psyches of all three men, and eventually provides the key to the murder mystery.

The seamless interweaving of elements in The Cardboard Universe is mind-boggling. It’s a detailed biography, self-reflexive journal, literary catfight, and hammy whodunit all contained in an alphabetized encyclopedia. A single entry might describe a short story’s plot about a time-travel love affair, relate its themes to the insecurities of its author, fit these into the larger context of Dank’s failed love life, and expose Boswell’s resentment of Dank’s third wife, who forced Boswell to move out of Dank’s house until the couple divorced weeks later (see the entry “Long-Distance Relationship”). Another describes a story about a pandemic virus that causes chronic lethargy that Dank wrote at the beginning of a two-year bout of severe laziness, which prompted the author, bedridden by choice save mechanized wheelchair rides to the toilet, to hire interns to write his books for him in a Warhol Factory-esque environment (except instead of a warehouse filled with avant-garde artists, Dank’s factory was a split-level house bustling with sci-fi geeks).

Nearly every page of The Cardboard Universe is funny. Miller’s humor is rarely sidesplitting — it’s more of a consistent amusing buzz. Most of the novel’s comic jabs land firmly in the ribs of science fiction, its fans and Phil Dick in particular, but Miller (through the mouthpiece of Boswell) saves some lines to defend the genre’s proponents: “[Dank] never lost touch, as a reader, with the pleasure principle. He never forgot what it feels like to read for sheer enjoyment, with no thought for self-improvement or cultural adornment. Most writers spend so many hours in their teens and twenties straining to love the right books, and — like self-repressing perverts — not to love the wrong ones, that by thirty they no longer even know what it means to love a book, and so of course their own are anything but loveable.”

It’s obvious Miller respects the pleasure principle of reading as much as his narrator does. A teacher at Bennington College and author of the well-received Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects, Miller is far from the sci-fi hacks he describes. His outstanding imagination and deftness for creating compelling sentences that approach pitiful people at lighthearted angles make The Cardboard Universe an intricate and enjoyable book.

Click here to read another take on Christopher Miller’s The Cardboard Universe, reviewed by Jessica Herman

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June 24, 2009

Sorry, Mr. Typewriter (It’s the first day of summer)

Note: It is no longer Saturday as I post this, nor is it any longer the first day of summer. It’s like the fourth or fifth day of summer, and every day has been as magical or more magical than the first.

I bought some ribbon for my typewriter today like one would purchase a pack of gum. I rode early (for a Saturday) to an obscure store half an hour north of my neighborhood that is open 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on weekdays, and 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. on Saturdays. As far as I know, it’s the only place in the city that sells typewriter parts.

The old man who owns the shop sits by himself among the dim hum of a radio and mountains of antique writing machines. He looked surprised when I entered but has obviously been in business long enough to know the mechanical motions of a transaction. I told him what I needed, he procured a small white box from an unsturdy metal shelf, I compared its contents to the spool I had pulled from my typewriter, gave him some cash, and turned to leave. He said something about the weather as I was walking out — an observation about its present beauty and the long, cold spring we’ve had to wait through to receive it. I agreed abruptly, then exited the shop.

I felt upset as soon as I was outside. I had deviated from the protocol that such a specialized purchase from such a unique place demands, and was worse off for it. We are both typewriter people — he an old one, and I a young one — and there are typewriter-people things to talk about. It would be like two animals of a particularly endangered species passing in the jungle and not even acknowledging each other. Worse, I was the one who cut the conversation short. I saw on his walls half a dozen newspaper clippings, spanning years and publications, that all featured profiles of him and his typewriter shop. I noticed one by Rick Kogan, a longtime Chicago Tribune writer who wrote Studs Terkel’s obituary. The shop owner had much to offer, and I blew him off.

I suppose I was just in a hurry. Getting typewriter ribbon was an errand I had to run, not a ritual. I have some packages to send that require notes, and I compose notes on my typewriter. I had to meet my friend for lunch in an hour, and faced a long ride back south. I didn’t have time to dally with the typewriter man.

I was also infused with adrenaline from the bike ride to the shop. The street I rode up was packed with cars manned by angry drivers, honking and yelling at each other in the heavy heat. It was almost 90 degrees, and I had flown up the lane between the empty cars parked on the curb and the occupied cars parked on the road. This makes for dangerous riding — the greater the difference between your speed and that of the traffic around you, the greater the peril. Drivers don’t anticipate bicyclists flying up beside them at less than an arm’s length, and I had a couple close calls when cars lurched in traffic-jam fashion into my path. I didn’t talk to Mr. Typewriter because I was all amped up on hormones.

Upon my arrival home I lied in the grass in my backyard in the pulsing sun rays. I couldn’t open my eyes for the brightness, and it felt like I was lounging in a furnace. I was sweaty from my commute and basked in the grime of the first real day of Chicago summer.

After lunch, my friend Danielle and I walked through the Puerto Rican Pride Parade/Festival that’s been happening half a block from my house all week. We gambled on a game for which you picked numbers and won if a mouse they released on a spinning table crawled into the hole labeled with the same digits. We bought a piña colada and drank it out of a pineapple. We talked about how she moved to Chicago last May, and had fun during the summer, but after experiencing a complete winter here, summer would be a entirely different thing: Summer in Chicago after winter in Chicago is a three-month-long victory dance, an explosion of freedom and fun, like being released from wrongful imprisonment. After a cold and rainy spring, it has finally begun.

Division Street

No se vende Humbolt Park

Yep

Cops are dicks

The mouse game

Danielle is scared of ghost pirates

Viva Puerto Rico!

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June 15, 2009

We All Can’t Die in Bed: Part IV

What follows is the fourth of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the second and final response, by Scott Ries, as he sent it to me in an email.

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part III: The First Response)

Why were you in Cairo? There long?

I got your postcard. I think that’s the best traveled piece of mail I’ve ever received, definitely from a friend.

Oh, here are my thoughts on Hocquenghem, formless and speculative:

Why, when I’m sitting at a very late breakfast with my lover, a friend, and a new acquaintance, would I hear the acquaintance laugh at the conjunction “homosexual/criminal”? Because he’s homosexual and feels offended? I doubt some combination thereof. Because the conversation has taken a turn for the pretentious? Probably. But I’d like to think:

Look at Fassbinder, who made 40 films (not including the TV and theater works) in 15 years. Homosexual. No, gay. He killed himself with cocaine and sleeping pills shortly after he turned 37. Radical. Where have the “progress”-fucking eddies of “sexual liberation” lead us? “Fassbinder’s summary of the plot [of Katzelmacher] reminds us of the way property relationships extend to sexuality in bourgeois society.” (Fassbinder, Filmmaker) Illegitimacy, promiscuity, disease, poverty: that which was necessarily rejected by the bourgeoisie is being begged to be forgiven, forgotten, excluded. Somehow we hear of love now as a heart-rending persuasion, a “unisexual” likeness. “Same sex marriage” is homosexuality’s suburb: I fear the suburb, not sexuality.

Why are all of our hip friends bisexual? Why is identifying as bisexual just easier for me, a refuge I often take? There’s a vodka billboard on my way home with a woman with an O-face: where has all the ugly gone? Advertising! That’s the secret problem with sexuality: “the market” meets desire at any cost, at no cost. Everything can shift right: ecology did. Happy Earth Month! Even straight people can’t keep their God-given (i.e. Throttled) desire for the same sex at bay. Not everyone is bisexual, but everyone will be, can, must become. The elimination of difference: a sufficient definition of ideology. Internalized multiculturalism. Sexual liberation did not open the bars of a prison; it opened the lock on the gated community. Centripetal, not centrifugal. A microfascism, like the one that killed Pasolini, is the pleasure of doubting ones sexuality while hating that one might be one or the other.

Since Hocquenghem’s death, too, the perpetrator of Pasolini’s murder is again an official mystery. Who killed Pasolini, Cornelius Cardew, and Walter Benjamin? How will Genet, Burroughs, Bacon, and Fassbinder read? Like Hocquenghem, maybe, I prefer dissimulation to revelation; let history itself dissimulate. How are we to compare the terrible images of Salo and that of Pasolini’s body itself, dead, face down in the dirt?

I’m resisting the temptation to revise it more along with the thought in my head that grad school teaches that all writing is paperwork.

I’m done with classes, sitting around, drinking alone at my girlfriend’s, watching some David Lynch. Not too bad….

Cheers, mate,
sr

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June 9, 2009

We All Can’t Die in Bed: Part III

What follows is the third of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the first response, by Lee Wharf, as he sent it to me in an email.

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

Nate,

I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on and respond to this unusual treatise on crime, class and homosexuality — God knows where you unearthed it. I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to “answer thoughtfully”; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual. The question of a fag’s place in the socio-criminal sphere is actually one which I’ve pondered at alarming length, so I appreciate the chance to hold forth on the subject.

I know little about Pasolini. The thoroughly modern thing to do would be to Wikipedia the poor bastard; I’d rather stick to my own scant impressions of the man. I saw one of his movies: avant-garde claptrap that I was too stoned to fathom, if you want my honest appraisal. I also attempted to read “A Violent Life,” his semi-autobiographical portrayal of hardscrabble Italian hustlers. The book, I recall, read like a movie, an effect I soon grew tired of. It had a sort of early-60’s graininess to it, and evoked an obsolete era to which I had difficulty relating — “Pasolini was old-fashioned,” as Hocquenghem surmises. I seem to remember that Pasolini was killed not so much by a “swindler” as a hustler; the linguistic difference is subtle but significant.

He reminds me strongly of Jean Genet, another venerated avant-queer who always seemed too remote to fully fire my imagination. Both men ruminated compulsively over the intersection of crime and homosexuality. Both seem unrelentingly literary.

What strikes me about Hocquenghem’s eerie polemic is that it seems to straddle eras, his lens panning away from Pasolini’s quaint world of public-urinal-trolling seediness — wasn’t Senator Craig’s true transgression not that he sought out gay sex but that he had the Old-World effrontery of seeking it out in an airport men’s room? — as the modern, “integrated” fag comes into blurry focus. The question he raises is whether this generational shift has done anything to change the “delinquent” nature of homosexuality; and if so, what has been lost along the way?

The philosophical divide that Hocquenghem navigates is one I’m familiar with. In my late-night bouts of time-travel, I sometimes journey back across the schism of Gay Liberation and explore Pasolini’s turf. It’s a landscape that I’m drawn to, if one I don’t quite comprehend. In this noir-ish realm, homosexuality requires quite a bit of detective work, its rites secret and complex — baroque, as Hocquengem has it. Something turns me on about this insistence on secrecy and predilection for the darkened doorway — it appeals to the unliberated fag in me, who doesn’t feel comfortable holding hands with a man in public or fighting for gay marriage. A good part of me, in short, comes down on the side of homosexuality’s inherent delinquency, if only for the sex appeal of it — my “libido attracted by objects outside the law of common desire.”

Another part of me tends toward the Burroughs school of literary escapism, where homosexuality is not so much delinquent as it is the only game in town — an alternate realm where boy soldiers suck each other off as a matter of routine. Even further down this rabbit-hole lies Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 10,000 Soldiers, a psychedelic re-imagining of the French-Algerian War that is so incessantly mud-splattered, blood-soaked and semen-drenched as to be virtually unreadable. God knows I’ve tried, several times, but it’s like staring at the sun, and after only a few pages my vision is fried. Here, delinquency doesn’t even hint at the depths of sexual violence; the book makes Pasolini’s hustlers look like choirboys.

But what do these flights of fancy have to say about our position today? Certainly, from a liberal-establishment perspective, the opportunities for a young faggot are brighter than ever. I might not reasonably hope to become, say, the President of the United States — despite what they always told me! Democracy has its limits — but I’m more or less free to be queer and pursue my life’s interests unimpeded by sexual orientation. I can, at least, seek out sex without undue fear of being murdered. Which is all well and good. But, as Hocquenghem remarks, “let’s not confuse self-defense with respectabilitization.” Or, respectabilitization at what cost? The author’s briefcase-toting, mustachioed, ad-exec fag seems outdated; let’s take this Hocquenghem on a stroll down modern-day Halsted Street, that he might witness establishment homosexuality in its full flower. Well-heeled fairies parade in $100 jeans; cultural activity on the strip is largely underwritten by multi-national beer companies, and if the season is right he might catch the alderman stumping for votes at the Pride Parade. The author might hang around the corner or Roscoe and Halsted for months on end without hearing anyone mention the “struggle for liberation”; he could haunt every fag bar in town and not find anything sordid or grandiose.

And yet, has delinquency really vanished entirely, or has it merely found new avenues for expression — moved, as have so many other human activities, online? Craigslist, for example, maintains a bustling bulletin board for anonymous sex, a sort of vast, virtual public urinal more sordid and grandiose than anything in Pasolini’s day, a pervert’s buffet of gangbangs and gloryholes. Is it a “freemasonry of crime where the homo and the murderer interact”? Maybe nothing as hysterical as all that, though I do offer the following news item: New York-based radio journalist George Weber was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, in late March of this year, bound with duct tape and stabbed upwards of 50 times; the confessed killer was a troubled 16 year-old hustler (the New York Daily News described him as a “Satan-loving sadomasochist with a knife fetish” — sordid enough?), who Weber picked up on Craigslist. Much as in Pasolini’s day, many commentators saw the victim as being every bit as guilty as his murderer; even on gay sites like advocate.com there was a great deal of finger-wagging — “They were both wrong,” one poster advised. “The victim shouldn’t have been having sex with a 16 year-old to begin with, much less supplying him booze and drugs…” How much, then, has really changed? Hocquenghem perhaps underestimates the indomitability of homosexual delinquency. Plenty of dark recesses, I think, remain in the homosexual sphere.

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June 5, 2009

We All Can’t Die in Bed: Part II

What follows is the second of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the essay.*

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part III: The First Response)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

“We All Can’t Die in Bed”
by Guy Hocquenghem

Pasolini was killed by a swindler

We all can’t die in bed, like Franco. The Italian extreme left is indignant. M.A. Macciocchi, in Le Monde, speaks of a fascist plot. More perceptively, Gavi and Maggiori show how the incident was a microfascist coup: the assassin, Pelosi, wasn’t used by fascism, he was the voluntary instrument of racism and the refusal of difference, the day-to-day nonpoliticized kind of fascism.

Probably, probably. Something all through this explanation does not convince me: the external and political nature of this viewpoint on the murder of a homosexual. Certainly you can’t help but agree with the analysis of the Pelosi case, you can’t help but to refuse to consider him, too, as a victim. Turning the other cheek is out of the question.

At the same time, Pasolini’s death seems to me neither abominable, nor even, perhaps, regrettable. As far as I’m concerned, I find it rather satisfying. So much less stupid than a highway accident. In a way, I would want it for myself and for all of my friends.

Sadian estheticism? I hope not: it is only that a fundamental aspect of this story of the murder of a homosexual, of homosexual murder, necessarily eludes the political analysts and those who mean to protect homosexuals from their potential murderers.

It is the intimate, ancient, and very strong bond between the homosexual and his murderer, a bond as traditional as their delinquent prescription in the big cities of the nineteenth century. We too often forget that dissimulation, the homosexual secret or lies, were never chosen for themselves, through a taste for oppression: they were necessary for projecting a desiring impulse towards the underworld, for a libido attracted by objects outside the laws of common desire. Vautrin, in Balzac, represents this underside of the civilized world born of the corruption of big cities where homosexuality and delinquency go hand in hand, very well. As an urban perversion, illicit homosexuality has always been linked with underworld crime. There is a specific “dangerousness” which surrounds homosexuality, homosexual blackmail, homosexual murder.

Gavi and Maggiori quite rightly point out that in the Pelosi trial, the victim is just as guilty as the murderer. Which is certainly scandalous, but it constitutes a distinctive feature of the homosexual condition. In the eyes of the courts and the police, there is, in these cases, no difference between victims and murderers. There is but one suspicious “milieu,” united by mysterious bonds, a free-masonry of crime where the homo and the murderer intersect. Homosexuality is first of all, and perhaps for a short while will continue to be, a category of criminality. Personally I prefer this state of affairs to its probable transformation into a psychiatric category of deviance. The libidinal link between the criminal and the homosexual ignores the rational concepts of law, the division of individual responsibility and the distribution of roles between victims and murderers. A homosexual murder is a whole, complete unto itself. A captain of the Belgian gendarmerie writes in an article devoted to the situation of homosexuals: “An attentive surveillance of this particular milieu makes it possible to compile a very useful dossier for the discovery of future swindlers, murderers, and possibly spies.”

“Decriminalizing Homosexuality?”

Some will tell me that this is precisely what we’re fighting against. So? Are we going to demand the rational progress of justice in distinguishing victims and the perpetrators? Are we going to require, as do the respectable homosexual associations, that the police and the courts accept complaints from homosexuals who are mistreated or blackmailed? Will we see gays, exactly like women, demand the condemnation of rapists by the courts and request protection under the law?

I think on the contrary that even in a struggle for liberation, homosexuality’s hope still lies in the fact that it is perceived as delinquent. Let us not confuse self-defense with “respectabilization.” The homosexual has frequent contact with the murderer: not only through masochism, suppressed guiltiness or a taste for transgression, but also because an encounter with such a character is a real possibility. Of course, one can always avoid it. All one needs do is avoid cruising in the criminal world. To stop cruising the streets. Not to cruise at all, or only to pick up serious young men from the same social sphere. Pasolini wouldn’t be dead if he had only slept with his actors.

This is what eludes all those who sincerely want to “decriminalize” homosexuality, to defend it against itself by severing its bonds with a hard, violent and marginal world.

These combatants are unaware that they are thus joining the vast movement, in France and America for example, of respectabilization and neutralization of homosexuality. That movement does not progress by increased repression, but relies, on the contrary, on an intimate transformation of the homosexual type, freed from his fears and his marginality and finally integrated into the law.

The traditional queen, likable or wicked, the lover of young thugs, the specialist of street urinals, all these exotic types inherited from the nineteenth century, give way to the reassuring modern young homosexual (age 25 to 40) with mustache and briefcase, without complexes or affectations, cold and polite, in an advertising job or sales position at a large department store, opposed to outlandishness, respectful of power, and a lover of enlightened liberalism and culture. Gone are the sordid and the grandiose, the amusing and the evil. Sado-masochism itself is no longer anything more than a vestiary fashion for the proper queen.

A “White” Homosexuality

A stereotype of the legal homosexual, integrated into society, molded by the Establishment, close to it in his tastes, and reassured, moreover, by the powerful presence of an undersecretary who himself is a homosexual without any false shame — homosexuality is no longer a secret shared only by a few initiates — progressively replaces the baroque diversity of traditional homosexual styles. Finally the time will come when the homosexual will be nothing more than a tourist of sex, a gracious member of Club Med who has gone a little farther than the others, with a horizon of pleasure slightly broader than that of his average contemporary.

We cannot suspect any of this unless we frequent the homosexual circle, a rather closed whole which forges, even for the most isolated homosexual, the social image of his condition. Normalizing pressures move quickly, even if Paris and the bars of the rue Sainte-Anne are not all of France. While there are still queens seeking Arabs in the suburbs or Pigalle, a movement has undeniably been launched for a truly white homosexuality in every sense of the term. And it is rather curious to note, looking at ads and films or at the exits of the gay bars, the emergence of a unisex model — common to homosexuals and heterosexuals — offered up to the desires and identification of all. Homosexuals become indistinguishable, not because they hide their secret better, but because they are uniform in body and soul, rid of the saga of their ghetto, reintroduced fully and completely not into their difference but into their similarity.

And everyone will fuck in his own social class, the dynamic junior executives will breathe with rapture the smell of their partners’ aftershave, and even the Pope will no longer be able to defect anything wrong with it. A very natural thing, as a recent film said. The new official gay will not go looking for useless and dangerous adventures in the short-circuits between social classes. He will surely go on being a sexual pervert, he’ll experiment with fist-fucking or flagellation, but with the cool good sense of sexological magazines, not in social violence, but in sex techniques. Pasolini was old-fashioned, the prodigious remains of an epoch that is now being left behind.

Translated by George Richard Gardner, Jr.

*This essay was retyped from its printed version as it appeared in Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, (edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvére Lotringer, MIT Press, 2001)

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June 3, 2009

We All Can’t Die in Bed: Part I

What follows is the first of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the introduction.

(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part III: The First Response)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

I have recently become conscious of a particularly annoying type of person that operates in some circles I have become involved in: the gay yuppie. I suppose I am the one who, in fact, invaded their social spaces, but it perturbs me that I would find any kind of yuppies in any social circle I frequent.

I deplore yuppies for all the normal reasons — their wishy-washy appreciation of whatever “culture” is fashionable that particular month, their unblinking embrace of consumerism, their safe jokes, boring jobs, pressed clothes and blindingly white teeth. I work in a neighborhood that’s rife with yuppies, but never interact with them at any level above the sidelong glance I cast in their direction in response to nods or smiles they use in attempt to affirm some kind of kinship between us as we pass on the sidewalk. I imagine the Puerto Rican public-housing dwellers in my neighborhood feel somewhat the same about me.

The gay yuppie is more detrimental to my life on a tactical level than the straight yuppie simply because I have to deal with the gay yuppie more often and on more intimate terms — although I still prefer the house show, loft party, dive bar and city street over any respectable establishment as a venue for social shenanigans, my tastes have grown somewhat more “adult” with age and I find myself occasionally in places suitable to people who would never haunt the haunts I normally haunt. Despite my new-found (relative) refinement, I still hardly ever go places where typical (straight) yuppies would feel readily welcome, but I have begun to venture where one can find, as the article that prompted this series of blog posts puts it, “gracious members of Club Med who have gone a little farther than [straight squares], with a horizon of pleasure slightly broader than that of his average contemporary.”

The gay yuppie, although not described by that term, is a subject of concern in Guy Hocquenghem’s essay, “We All Can’t Die in Bed.” The gay yuppie, the Club Med queer, the “modern young homosexual with mustache and briefcase,” is the counterpoint to the homosexual criminal, embodied in Hocquenghem’s essay by Pier Pasolini, a gay Italian filmmaker who was murdered in 1975 (allegedly) by a 17-year-old hustler he picked up on the streets. “So much less stupid than a highway accident,” Hocquenghem writes of Pasolini’s death. “In a way, I would want it for myself and for all of my friends.”

The essay expounds upon Pasolini’s death to discuss the situation in which homosexuality found itself in the late 1970s. Hocquenghem dreaded the decline of what he saw as a multifaceted, vibrant and utterly radical subculture as it was co-opted into normalcy, with the advantages of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality by society severely outweighed by the disadvantages of that subculture losing its potency as an alternative to the boring plague of typical, impotent Western culture. He calls the new situation a “White” Homosexuality: a term purposeful in its implications that the dominant white, capitalist, Christian structure will leave you alone as long as you act as if you’re part of it, but understand — since you don’t meet certain criteria of race, privilege and/or orientation — that you’re still ultimately a victim.

Hocquenghem published his essay over 30 years ago, but as the following responses suggest, it still resonates among young people who are concerned with its topic today. The two friends I asked to write about it are Scott Ries and Lee Wharf. Scott is an old friend of mine who I met in college in Salt Lake City, with whom I’ve traveled on three separate occasions to the West Coast, each trip more traumatizing and delightful than the last. He also lived with me in Lawrence, Kan., where we survived a tornado. Lee is a much more recent acquaintance, though a compelling one on each subsequent occasion we meet. Scott is a budding academic currently studying digital poetics (or something equally difficult and obscure) at SUNY Buffalo, and Lee can be found on any given night cavorting around the South Side of Chicago among the plentiful subversive delights that part of the city provides. Both are incredibly smart, as well as fitting choices to comment on the present topic. Lee replied rather deftly to my faux-unassuming query as to whether he would participate in this project: “I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to ‘answer thoughtfully’; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual.”

The next post contains the full text of Guy Hocquenghem’s essay, “We All Can’t Die in Bed.” Subsequent posts contain responses to the essay by Scott Ries and Lee Wharf.

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May 15, 2009

Traveling: What’s the point?

This is a question I asked myself on the night-train ride from Cairo to Alexandria, two hours north from where the Egyptian capital sits at the beginning of the Nile Delta up through the impoverished urban sprawl that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean, to the historic port city that was once home to the greatest lighthouse of the ancient world, as well as one of the grandest libraries ever constructed and burned, and its duly impressive modern counterpart.

It was my third night in Egypt. I was riding along with two friends I knew from Lawrence, Kan., and another American with whom they taught at a private English-language grade school in Cairo. We passed around magazines and portions of the day’s International Herald Tribune, which we had sought and discovered at a newsstand downtown earlier that day. I scoff at any nostalgic longing for the preservation of print media, since the Internet does what newspapers — and I’ll admit despite my current occupation, most magazines — do, but I must say that, because I had little access to the Web where I was staying, the newspaper felt like a treasure when I found it in Cairo. Information was not constantly readily at my fingertips, as it is in the States. Even if I found a newsstand in Cairo that sold English-language newspapers, they were almost always the ones that were, at least in part, owned by the State, as nearly all media are in Egypt, and therefore did not qualify as anything I would support with a purchase. For a news enthusiast such as myself, coming across the Herald Tribune in Cairo was like stumbling upon a delicious meal in a land of bad food — which, arguably, Egypt might be considered — as it was something I could cherish, consume and digest until it was expended, and then I could look forward to searching for and devouring another the next day.

I could not manage to focus my attention on the paper during the ride, though. For one, each glance out the window revealed some glimpse of surreal mystery — a poorly lit dirt alley that ran long and straight enough to crest with the horizon, an unmarked bus stop at which dozens of men huddled smoking together, the five spires of a neon green mosque towering up out of the shanties. Egypt, to me, was a place where the sheer sensory overload of my surroundings was enough to keep my brain stimulated during my short stay there, but a corner of my mind kept nagging at me: “Okay, you’ve gotten yourself to Egypt and can see all these things you’d never before imagined, but is that really the point?”

I always say that when I travel to a place the only thing I really want to do is act like I live there. I almost never take a trip to somewhere I don’t have friends to stay with, and when I arrive, I do as they do, go where they go, and socialize with whom they socialize. I would go to work with them if they let me. One might mistake this for a bit of imaginary role playing on my part — an escape from my life into someone else’s, far away from my own — but it’s actually the opposite. My life when I travel is just as much my life as it is when I am wherever I happen to be living. I consider travel in any other manner pretty much pointless.

The idea of vacation is absurd. People cobble together some semblance of a life out of jobs and relations and hobbies and interests and try as hard as possible to make something decently worthwhile of it, then throw it all away for weeks at a time while they sit somewhere sunny or scuttle from one point of interest to another, fondling tour books and gawking at monuments, essentially putting on hold everything life-wise they have worked to accomplish. Vacation, in this sense, is a break from life, or non-life — or, even the opposite of life: death. I plan on using as much time as I have undertaking the singular task of living, thank you very much.

So, what to do in Cairo? At a glance, it’s a batshit-crazy fantasyland of overwhelmingly exotic sights and sounds produced by a culture that is, in any “authentic” way, about as accessible to an average Westerner as an experimental French film is to a three-year-old cave baby. Sure, Egypt is deeply infused with Western tendencies, thanks to nearly a century of British colonialism and its latter-day counterpart, tourism, but the chances of grappling a hold onto any sort of meaningful connection with “real” Egyptian culture during a 10-day stay is slight. You’re not going to make it to your third cup of tea with anyone besides upper-class English-speaking Egyptians like the ones I met through my American friends.

With this in mind, I took a mental step backwards during my train ride to Alexandria and tried to get a better vantage of exactly what it is about acting like I live in the places I visit that is rewarding. I realized that it goes something like this:

Superimposing my life onto another place, another culture, is exhilarating because it gives me a sense of possibility. During the 18 years I spent growing up in a small town in Wyoming I dreamt constantly of the possibilities of living elsewhere, especially of the opportunities that living in a more populated area would afford me. I built up such a frenzied desire to live somewhere else that even now, living in the fifth city since I left the one I was born in — one in which I have secured a stupendous lifestyle that affords me nearly everything I could have wished for during my desolate adolescence — I still have that urge to live “somewhere else.” Where? Who knows? Who cares? Anywhere and everywhere.

I have conflicting feelings toward this fancy-to-roam inclination of mine. I have never been a true vagabond, hopping rides from state to state, sleeping where I may and getting by on my wits. My geographic repositioning has run essentially parallel to what any upstanding citizen would consider a series of responsible decisions: I left my hometown to move to another in which I went to college, then I moved to another town to go to grad school, then I moved to another in order to fulfill that increasingly popular middle-class rite of passage of a short jaunt abroad before entering the “real world,” and finally to another back in my country of nationality where I secured a steady job in the field of my preference. There’s nothing too crazy about my moving around — but still, I get around.

I never thought much about this until I reached what “adulthood.” I initially imagined that my stay in Chicago would provide me with satisfactions that my other temporary residences could not: a social circle that did not resemble a crowd through a revolving door, an occupation of which I could acquire a true sense of ownership, an investment in a community that I would interact with symbiotically, and an apartment where I could finally aggregate some stuff. However, seven months into my life here, I still have that urge to go somewhere else.

Am I packing up my bags and scouring Craigslist for job openings in Odessa? Of course not. As I said, my wanderlust abides by criteria of reasonableness. But there is a part of me that wonders if it will ever go away — if I do force myself to stay in one place for an extended period of time, will I be repressing the desires I ingrained in myself during childhood to venture out and see what opportunities arise, thus depriving myself of something? Will I simply be unable to create a life extended across a significant span of time in a single place? Am I doomed to keep collecting friends I’ll move away from and never regularly see again outside Facebook? What kind of life would that be?

On the other hand, I fear losing the part of me that always wants to leave. Because all humans are susceptible to the lures of comfort and the safety of routine, it’s possible, if not likely, that one day I will be perfectly happy settling into a spot for the long haul to destiny. This thought makes me sad. I feel like I hardly know myself at all as it is, and one of the only parts of myself that I am familiar with is the one that comes and goes. I know Nate: He shows up, and then he’s out of here, onto something else. Who is that guy who’s just sitting there, stationary, in the same stupid chair on the same dumb porch, watching spiders crawl down the wall?

Travel, I decided, helps me cope with this dilemma. It’s not that it quenches my thirst for new surroundings with a brief respite in some unfamiliar terrain, but, by finding entry points into the flow of wherever I go — by acting like I live there — I remind myself that there is nothing forcing me to not go and live wherever I please. In Cairo, I did not immerse myself in the local customs in order to feel the strange sensation of interacting with the Other — I hung out with expats and Westernized Egyptians who assured me that I could get a job easily there and live with little problem. In a sense, the actual time I spent in Egypt was not as gratifying as what it revealed to me about my future: the possibility of, once again, living abroad.

When I returned to the States from staying six months in Buenos Aires, I had the inkling of returning South, but that notion was quickly subsumed by the day-to-day worries of acclimating myself to whatever present condition I found myself in, and figuring out what the hell I was going to do with my life. The sense of connection I feel with that city has been somewhat revived by a series of Argentine visitors to my home in Chicago over the last few months, but it wasn’t until I returned abroad that I really felt with certainty that I would, and should, figure out a way to live once again in a country other than the one I have citizenship. I already have a social base in Buenos Aires and a pleasant remembrance for the life I lead there, so it’s currently number one on my list of places to move to, but being in Cairo made me realize I could go anywhere.

I’m in Chicago until further notice. Summer has just begun and I’m excited to be here. But I am not in immobile object, though, in any sense. Cairo made me remember how broad my options stretch. Keep an eye out, foreign lands. I’m not through with you just yet.

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April 30, 2009

The Cairo Force Field

On my first jaunt out into Cairo alone I made it relatively near to my destination after an only slightly awkward and opaque exchange with a cabbie. I didn’t really know where I was going, and wouldn’t have known exactly how to tell him if I had. I picked a big street near a big landmark downtown and off we went.

I was searching for the Townhouse Gallery, a multipurpose art establishment at which I would attend an exhibition opening later that night.

I arrived at my approximate destination and wandered into a nearby Hilton, approached the balding Egyptian man at the Information Desk and announced that I was lost. He chuckled and gave me a map, then scooted me out the door. I told the concierge outside which street I was looking for, and he said it began beneath a billboard we could both see from the hotel steps. “Great,” I thought, and took off in that direction, only to learn a few seconds later that he had neglected to mention that in between where we had stood and the beginning of Mohamed Bassouny St. stretched the four busiest streets in the world.

Cairo traffic is a seething, fluid mass of chaos, rubber and metal. Lanes aren’t even guidelines, and the cars are packed around each other on all sides, with motorcycles in between. It is more impressive in scope and composition than the pyramids. It’s a hulking beast that operates according to the riddle of the sphinx.

Luckily, my days as a traffic control worker on highway construction sites have steeled my nerves in respect to cars zipping by my vulnerable body at close quarters. One learns quickly that a car must only miss you by a quarter of an inch, or less, for it to do absolutely no damage, no matter how fast it is traveling. My friends with whom I’m staying here explained to me that crossing the menacing lanes of Cairo is largely an act of faith. “You step off the curb, and … Insha’Allah,” they said.

I also observed on my first days in the city a tool used by Egyptians that seems to help put God on their sides when venturing on foot into traffic. I call it “The Cairo Force Field.” It’s always a good idea to find a local going the same way you are and to cross busy streets downstream from him, because people who live in Cairo are masters of this tactic, but if you are on your own or have gained sufficient confidence to cross by yourself, learning the force field is a must.

There is a secret language to Cairo traffic. A single honk from a driver means, “I’m going,” as in, “there is a gap in traffic in front of me and although you other drivers around me might be intent on filling it, in fact I am going to fill it.” A double honk means, “Get out of the way, I’m coming in,” and so on, with slight variations.

The Cairo force field is a pedestrian tool and is something of the adverse to the honk. When a person is crossing a street and using the force field, which is actually just a hand held out with a palm facing oncoming cars, it means, “I’m going,” as in, “I’m going to walk out in front of you now because I have ascertained that you have seen me and are going slow enough to be able to not run me over.” It’s really amazing how well it works. It’s like holding two magnets with similar charges together – they simply repel each other. It’s as if cars have positively charged magnets in their front bumpers, and when you’re in Cairo crossing the street, you have them embedded in your palms.

The force field only works on cars moving forward, however. A favorite, utterly befuddling move I have seen here repeatedly is when a cab or bus driver misses a turn, and instead of going around the block or flipping a u-turn, they simply back up into oncoming traffic. The drivers, understandably, do not want to be backing up into oncoming traffic for any longer than they have to, so they go as quickly as possible. No force field can stop them – you simply have to jump back onto the curb and be thankful for your life.

This video is not mine:

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