Back from the dead: The Seven Godlike Books of James McCourt (orig. 11/09/06)

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Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975; New York Review of Books Classics, 2002)

Official description: Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced "Mardu Gorgeous") bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.


Blurbs:
'Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov, who makes his daringly self-assured debut with this intelligent and very funny book.'— Susan Sontag

'Mawrdew Czgowchwz is a Zuleika Dobson of the opera world. James McCourt is an ecstatic fabulist, robustly funny and inventive, and touchingly in love with his subject. His novel is both special and precious, in the most honorable senses of those words.'— Walter Clemons, Newsweek

'The reader must be prepared to follow the silver-tongued writer through an outlandish landscape, unquestioning. Reason would be out of place here. She would upset the ecological balance of a rich and delicate world.'— John Yohalem, The New York Times Books Review


from the Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum:

To call Mawrdew Czgowchwz the great novel of the opera queen is less accurate than to call it the great novel of the gay virtuoso gabber—that creature of lists, parentheses, digressions, apostrophes, opinions, and contradictions. Oscar Wilde belongs to this tribe of loudmouths. So do Dorothy Dean, costar of Warhol’s Afternoon, and Charles Nelson Reilly, game-show stalwart. Although McCourt does not hesitate to connect connoisseurship to what a sociologist might call a “gay fan-base,” his novel skimps eroticism, despite its romantic ending, and despite the prose’s nonstop orgasm. Rapture is reserved for the voice of its heroine and its plural narrators (Rodney, Jameson O’Maurigan, Mother Maire Dymphna, and others contribute to the polyphony). Energy’s displacement from eroticism to music has nothing to do with the “closet” or with prudishness, for music is not a code for sexuality: rather, music is a sexuality. .... McCourt’s genius lies in his ability to weave the highest styles of twentieth-century literature and music with the gutsy vernacular of men/women (like Candy Darling and Myra Breckinridge) who modeled themselves after Jean Harlow and died in the process.

McCourt’s subsequent works go even farther into the lunatic fringe, the only place where I feel at home. To the reader who enjoys Mawrdew, I highly recommend McCourt’s other novels, Time Remaining and Delancey’s Way, and also his short-story collection, Kaye Wayfaring in “Avenged.” It is not pejorative to call a work of art “minor.” Deleuze and Guattari, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, claimed that Kafka himself was a minor writer, and more important for being minor. Robert Walser, too, is subaltern: a writer’s writer, with the melancholy of music’s minor keys. Like other noble practitioners of that strain of modern literature (an elect galaxy including Firbank, Schuyler, Butts, Cavafy, Pessoa, and Rhys), James McCourt has the gift of not assuming that writing is a way of being polite, accommodating, or sociable. Although his novels give comic delight, they also are willing to perplex their readers, and to suggest, in their language’s bejeweled barbed wire, that pleasure is beyond our capacity to understand, and that we turn to literature not to see our desires made lucid, but to see a reflection of our transports at their most difficult.



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Kaye Wayfaring in Avenged (Viking, 1985)

Description: It is October, a peak fall day. Kaye Wayfaring sits on a rock high in the Ramble of Central Park, smoking raw Luckies, considering impetus.

Impetus is what she will need to plunge into Orphrey Whither's ''Avenged,''''based on a Diderot tale already once brought to the screen as 'Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne' (Robert Bresson, director, France, 1944),'' of which the harried unit press agent had written in the release for the first day's shooting, ''another dimension is revealed in the geometry of human lust,'' continuing, ''Never before has desire so bruised, so scalded so cruelly.''

Kaye Wayfaring, ''two-time Oscar nominee (for 'We Are Born, We Live, We Die' and for 'Way Station'),'' sits, broods, smokes, considers ''Avenged.'' H. Q. P., ''that seasoned, trusted metropolitan arbiter and public scold,'' had ventured to write of her: ''So on , so forth ; vivid and particular. No actress in these past two weary decades has displayed so deft a form. Wayfaring does deliver - in the Sullavan-Stanwyck-Lombard tradition, with offhand, odd resemblances to, among others, Irene Dunne, Frances Farmer and, eerily, Jeanne Eagels. Kaye Wayfaring is something of a navigator. Impetus is her concern.''



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Time Remaining (Knopf, 1993)

Official description: From the author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz ... and Kaye Wayfaring in "Avenged" ... - two wildly brilliant, moving, electric stories of gay life in New York during the last twenty-five years. The first story introduces Delancey, performance artist and, in his words, "one of the sole survivors" of a band known as the Eleven against Heaven. Delancey's recollections of four decades in the flamboyant New York wilds - spirited, defiant, festive, bright as paint (or acid) - are filled with the force of longing and the melodrama of remembering.

Delancey's prologue sets the stage for the title story, "Time Remaining," in which the formidable Odette O'Doyle - semi-retired transvestite ballerina, veteran of foreign wars, and polymath recorder of the stories of valiant lives - assumes the spotlight. On a midnight train to Long Island's South Fork, Odette reports on his just-completed mission: he has deposited the ashes of eight of the former "Eleven" in various rivers, canals, fjords, and harbors of Europe. Through the ceremonies of time, travel, ritual re-enactment, and eternal return, this renegade celebrant officiates at something very like an Irish Catholic wake. He recalls a glittering chain of outrageous adventures and a terrible history of decimating disease and death while conducting a private service of reconciliation and renewal.

Time Remaining is a moving, defiantly hilarious solemnization of life and love in the age of AIDS.

Review:'I Go Back to the Mais Oui," the first of two stories offered here, presents a summation of 40 years of gay life in New York by protagonist Danny Delancey, thereby providing a context for the much lengthier "Time Remaining," which follows. In that piece--a novel, really--Danny is joined by Odette O'Doyle, an ancient, wise, all-knowing drag queen who has lived through those 40 years. As they ride the midnight train across Long Island, Odette unbeads his pearls, dropping story after story from his personal epic. And what an epic! McCourt presents us with an encyclopedic view of gay New York, from high to low culture, from Frank O'Hara, Judy Garland, and the Everard Baths to ACT UP and the Clit Club, leaving no queer stone unturned. For some, Odette's discursive, anecdotal, manic soliloquy may be off-putting. But taken together, these brilliant stories add up to a life, one full of wit and anger, courage and love.'-- Library Journal


Etc:
* Podcast: James McCourt interviewed about 'Time Remaining' on NPR's Bookworm
* James McCourt reviewsThe Collected Stories of Noel Coward



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Delancey's Way(Knopf, 2000)

Review: Few literary writers take on Washington, D.C., probably for fear of stumbling into tired satire or overblown intrigue. James McCourt is undeterred by these risks, however, and successfully avoids them. Delancey’s Way presents a whirl of D.C. players and hangers-on in an elaborate, at times paranoiac, portrayal of the city that smacks of Marcel Proust and Don DeLillo. Delancey’s Way derives its energy from its carnivalesque language. The scenes, whether set in a cab from Union Station or a masked ball at the Library of Congress, entail characters discoursing to one another in lively harangues. As the novel progresses, one character after another goes gonzo, spewing references both classical and kitsch, and sprinkling every fourth sentence with foreign phrases. The reader—or listener—becomes an awed witness to these wild and virtuoso verbal performances. In response to a comment from Ornette, the jazz-playing redactor of race, Delancey thinks, “Where that came from I couldn’t have told you”—and then realizes he’s not writing this story, it’s writing him, and that’s just how things happen in D.C. -- Review of Contemporary Fiction

Review:"Sometimes this book is funny, and sometimes it's very funny. What it is, is an acidic romp through the political high and low roads of Washington, where the President is known as POTUS and Hillary (sometimes) as FLOTUS, with a wacky cast. The book is dense with allusion--political, literary, filmic, operatic, mythological, and more--uncommon in today's watery literary scene. The writing can veer from plain to stream-of-consciousness to labyrinthine. Thus, the same page can yield "Clinton is a masochistic hick out of Dogpatch turned high toned sadist," and "Clinton as Clint Eastwood--the quintessential Quantrill's Raiders personality."-- Library Journal


Etc:
* James McCourt profiled and interviewed about Delancey's Way by Patsy Southgate


Excerpt:

I never went to bed early in my life.

Until a minute ago . . .

You might have known it would all start out that way.

The first sentence I heard in my own head on the Metroliner to Washington. I'd put down Democracy (you know, the novel of Washington by "Anonymous" turned out to be written — depending on your politics, or your psychic — by either Henry or Clover Adams), gone to the back of the club car and from the window watched the tracks seeming to issue in two steel ribbons from underneath the train, then returned to my seat, a permeable signifier full of metaphoric dread, and succumbed to a little nap, tired of others' voices and of my own plans.

No systematic chronicle, I told myself as I drifted off, but more a rambling disquisition, with copious historical discussion and many anecdotes.

I never went to bed early in my life. Until a minute ago. Two lies, a sentence and a phrase, in the forced conjunction (or dual emphasis) of which there arises a tensile ambiguity — between the stronger and the weaker force — that sparks narrative. Always a forced conjunction, a duality, since what is a true sequence (this/that) if not an uninterrupted flow of conscious-radical-unconscious ideation-pulsation, lasting from the moment of birth until the moment of insanity and/or death? Nothing.

(Cont.)



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Wayfaring at Waverly in Silverlake (Knopf, 2002)

Description: After skewering Clinton-era Washington in Delancey's Way (2000), McCourt, stylistically rambunctious and metaphysically inclined, descends on 1980s Hollywood and rejoins diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (the subject of his first novel) and movie star Kaye Wayfaring, Mawrdew's daughter-in-law, mother of twins, and the focus of an earlier short story collection. In this set of interlocking tales, each a droll riff on one of the seven deadly sins, Kaye, who misses her dear, departed friend, Marilyn Monroe, has just flummoxed everyone by appearing in a wildly successful rock video and is now working on a movie about an Irish pirate queen. Such story elements are deeply embedded within a fizzing hubbub of witty conversations spiked with Hollywood trivia and mysticism that morphs into jousts, reminiscences, and philosophical disputations to form a scintillating montage not unlike those of novelist Paul West. As for McCourt, all his canniness and irony can't conceal his love for Hollywood and its obsessions.


Blurb:'In Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, his hilarious deconstruction of the Hollywood signs, James McCourt is, as usual, erudite, recondite, and absolutely right.' -- Fran Lebowitz


Excerpt:

As out beyond long tinted windows Los Angeles lay gleaming in the bright air, while in the studio commissary the televised women’s Olympic marathon neared culmination on the multiscreen background wall, Leland de Longpré, Hyperion Pictures’ controversial new chief of concept evolution, was speaking words of caution and concern to the chief of publicity over lunch.

“Vanity of vanity, all—”

“But I didn’t say ‘vanity,’ ” the chief of publicity, purposedly attuned to words, objected. “I said ‘pride.’ And please don’t tell me they’re the same thing, because even if I don’t know exactly what vanity is, I do know what I think it isn’t.”

“True enough,” the strategist allowed (managing, his lunch partner thought, to sound both affirmative and not). “The Dodgers, it must be said, brought to Los Angeles a cohesive focus, enforcing a civic pride that had never been provided by the self-serving motion-picture industry. I’ve even heard it said the Dodgers in effect brought to bear on their adopted city the mysterious assimilative pride of Brooklyn—never to be confused with the exploitive vanity of Manhattan—thus creating, principally, but not entirely, through the Jewish factor, the atmosphere for the construction of a new civilization in what had been a desert.”

“As a matter of fact,” the publicist continued, boldly staking out his own territory, conceptually speaking, “whenever I’ve heard the word—‘vanity’—all I’ve thought of really is a piece of set decoration—one of those boudoir units with big round deco mirrors. Jean Harlow had one in Dinner at Eight.”

“It would seem clear,” Leland continued, relentlessly, “that vanity is not, all said and done, to be confused with devotional intensity. Devotional intensity is not vain; quite the opposite.”

(Cont.)



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Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985(W.W. Norton, 2003)

Official description: Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York in the golden age before McCarthyism, Queer Street tells the explosive story of gay culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Coming out himself in the "buttoned-up/button-down" 1950s, McCourt positions his own experience against the whirlwind history of the era, summoning a pageant of characters that includes Harry Hay, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote. In a learned but lively voice, McCourt highlights the major events of the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall Inn, the AIDS crisis that brought an end to a century of bathhouse culture, the ascendancy of the Christian right, and finally the social acceptance of gays that paradoxically marked the demise of queer culture.

Review:'The book is less a memoir or a social history of the neighborhoods and meeting places of old gay New York than a thick scrapbook of the distinctive gay cultural styles, sensibilities and forms of literacy that reached their apogee in postwar New York and Los Angeles, where the plays, songs, films and stars that constituted so much of the gay métier took shape. Drawing on his preternatural command of that postwar gay cultural universe, Mr. McCourt brings a learned queer eye to the oeuvre of gay icons ranging from Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Holly Woodlawn to Luchino Visconti, Douglas Sirk and Ronald Firbank (a fey novelist of the 1910's and 20's whose style Mr. McCourt's may most closely resemble), as well as Susan Sontag's famous 1964 essay on camp, the riches of opera and the cultural poverty of the standing-room line at the new Met compared with the old.'(Read more)-- The New York Times Book Review


Brief excerpt:



"I hate to be a pill, to piss on smoldering embers, no matter how warming, but the facts are these: it was neither Larry Kramer's hysterics, the courageous reporting of the New York Native, Everett Koop's blinding-hot moral flash or anything else that turned the tide of AIDS recognition in America and of AIDS research funding by the American government. It was nothing less or other than Ronald Reagan's sentimental - goddamnit - feelings for a fellow guy he just happened to like a whole hell of a lot from their Hollywood days, a guy called Rock Hudson who came down with the goddamn thing. And if you don't think them's the facts, go look them up. As our story winds down to a close, darlings, in the year 1985, rather than cut AIDS funding by ten million, Ronald Reagan - or more probably Nancy, as Ronnie was already, courtesy of Alzheimer's, more and more lunching out, though not in public - was upped to one hundred million, and, get this right please, a 270 percent increase in AIDS funding. You see, darlings, all that heaven allows written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life."


Etc.:
* Podcast: James McCourt interviewed about Queer Street on NPR's 'Bookworm'
* A profile of James McCourt from Time Out New York



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Now Voyagers (Turtle Point Press, 2007)

Description: Now Voyagers is James McCourt’s long awaited sequel to Mawrdew Czgowchwz. Like his earlier novel, Now Voyagers delights in the whys and wherefors of celebrity and is a tribute to the triumph of art and music; love and humor. 'Tragic wisdom, we discover, can also be le gai savoir, and James McCourt has made a real specialty of transforming intricate wisdom into no more than discerning frivolity, no less than divine frenzy; as he puts it: a running-neon paradigm of the quintessence of diva-dienst! For the purposes (if that is not too grandiose a word) of such fiction, fun is fun, but folly a kind of fate. How I envy Mawrdew's new readers, though remaining helplessly content as a repeat defender.'— Richard Howard


Visit Turtle Point Press


Excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE

"There was a time," she then said, "time out of mind."

"So to begin," he replied, "at the beginning alike of the story and its solemn telling. Only what we're actually up to here in this stately room as the hour of the wolf approaches is more in the nature of the good old Invocation in Medias Résumé. And so far from our topos being of a time time out of mind, we've got it on both our minds big time and why not, so? Aristotle says. After this comes the construction of Plot, which some rank first one with a double story. That's us front and center, right down the line.

"But yes, for the listening world the standard model of the universe of fable always kicks in with Fado, fado, once-upon-a-time, Il y a, Es war, ci-fu-all requisite portal tropes of children's stories, of creation fables, of foundation protocols, and the sonorous sagas of the impossibly valiant. Nice to know we're in with the right crowd, anyway, so far as posterity goes-although enforst, parfit, whilom, and eftsoons we must forcibly abjure, lest we tip our hand too early and queer the pitch altogether. How does that sound? Yawpish enough, think you, for the general populace?"

"You've captured my attention-but the story is you always have."

The clock of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower four blocks away on Madison Square had just struck eight familiar tones, signaling the half hour, in this instance half past eleven on the signal evening of June 16, 2004. In the front parlor of 47 Gramercy Park North, two old friends had sat down together at an old walnut oval Sheraton table to regroup their forces: S.D.J. (The) O'Maurigan and the woman once known (as she would have it, but in truth known still to the knowing world such as it was) as Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano diva of the twentieth century, lately registered in the civic directory as Maev Cohalen, MAPA, psychoanalyst at New York's Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and psychotherapist for the cadets and teaching staff at the Police Academy on East Twentieth Street.

The friends, elected affinities and denizens both of the night and the city, had just come in from an evening at Symphony Space on Upper Broadway, having participated in the boisterous Bloomsday centennial reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. (He had enacted Simon Dedalus from "The Wandering Rocks" and she Gertie MacDowell from "Nausicaa.") Now, in their one-room preceptory they had begun the work of the midnight hour, the examination of a collection of tapes dating back forty-seven years to the nineteen fifty-six-fifty-seven theatrical season, and a dusty manuscript entitled MNOPQR STUVWXYZ, unearthed earlier in the day from what they called the press, a large mahogany cupboard on the top floor of the town house. Each looked to the other uncertainly, wondering what had they done, what were they about to do?

"Here," he then said, "is a definite beginning, lest our plan be accused of lacking the most defining characteristics of a strategy-forethought, preparation, a definite objective in mind. A manuscript in the form of an extended telegram, entailing the allegorized matter of an epic fable, has been dislodged after many decades from its hiding place in an old cupboard, and the following story, correcting the fable and forging its corrected elements into a fragment of a history is, by many separate voices, told in full, or as nearly as can be. Ought to be enough for anybody is our feeling."

"You hurried down that same evening of the sailing and had the thing dispatched shore to ship."

"Yes, There was a time, time out of mind-the opening words of the offering we found uncanny, the offering called MNOPQR STUVXYZ, unpronounceable, but immediately recognizable and clocked for what it was, that sent us on a season's merry chase after means, motives, opportunities, and mischiefs.

"The whole of it, entirely in majuscule. The longest telegram on record, dispatched from the Western Union office across Broadway from the old house, up the block from Longchamps. Shore to ship-although come to think of it now, Leo Lerman always called Manhattan itself a great ocean liner, so possibly ship to ship. And even now, understanding much that youth and ignorance caused me at the time to remark without comprehending, I find it hard to disentangle the ... etcetera. Yes, there was a time, time out of mind ... so there was."

The woman who had been Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, took up the long telegram of the allegorical text (representing her as Mnopqr Stuvwxyz) she had first read another life ago (or so it seemed, without exaggeration) while crossing the Atlantic with her then companion Jacob Beltane, oltrano, on the Queen Mary in late September, nineteen fifty-six.

THERE WAS A TIME TIME OUT OF MIND IN THE SEMPITERNAL PROGRESS OF ITAL DIVADIENST AT THAT SUSPENSORY PAUSE JUST PRIOR TO THE ADVENT OF WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN AS MNOPQRDOLATRY OR IN CERTAIN QUARTERS ITAL STUVWXYZCHINA WHEN THE CULT OF NIRVANA MORI FLOURISHED IN THE HOTHOUSE AMBIENCE OF THE CROSSROADS CAFE ON 42ND STREET ACROSS BROADWAY FROM THE VERY HOTEL WHERE IN THE GREAT DAYS CARUSO HAD IN SOMETHING LIKE THE SACRAMENTAL SENSE RECEIVED DESTINN WHOSE PALMY LOBBY ONCE ORMOLU MARBLE AND VELVET HAD BEEN TRANSFORMED INTO A VAST DRUGSTORE AND WHERE LATELY IN CARUSOS SUITE A PODIATRIST INSTALLED STOP THERE AT THE CROSSROADS CAFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE TIMES BUILDING NOVEMBER TO NOVEMBER FOR MORI WAS A DEAD CENTER SCORPIO THE GREAT WORLDS RAW CONCERNS WERE FLATLY IGNORED

The Crossroads Café: if Manhattan was a great ocean liner, the Crossroads Café was one of the places you could cross from first down to third-to social steerage. In that it resembled a chapel, didn't it, and even if you think of it a swimming pool-other places on board for crossing up or down.

"Crossing up, crossing down: dress stage. Passing ships-there's an idea, if not quite-"

"Original. It was a dark and stormy-"

"No, it was nothing like a dark and stormy night. There was a moon."

"That there was, waning from full, viewed from ship's deck in Manhattan as well-shining across the Great Meadow in the Park. This night, though dark enough here on the street where you live, isn't stormy, not yet. But then in New York lit up the way it is, on such languid summer nights how often come torrential rain and crashing thunder, too, like on the event-driven night of the first Bloomsday itself, when and while in the aftermath of old hurts new-enacted, two famously unlikely companions ... but they've likely not yet gotten to Eumaeus uptown, so let's bide our time in sultry air and set about our business, the drawing up of blueprints for a biosphere."

"You wrote a poem about that waning moon."

"It was that cool, clear late September evening on the day they sailed away, when we looked up and saw Pagliaccio in the moon-on the wane from full to gibbous. The wan expression on him-that moue, the oval mouth, sad eyes.Who was it said, 'Look at him-he's singing "Plaisir d'amour" and he's just come to "ne dure qu'un moment."'


"And on it went, detailing how the face in the moon, eyes, nose, mouth, is formed by the shadows cast upon the light-reflecting whole by the so-called maria, specifically the ... but of course I don't remember.

"And from there on to parallel imagined voyages across those seas whose names I don't recall, to the voyage out of the second line, employing every sort of word Arisotle designated-well, there are eight of those, and I do, or could recall them and what they had to do with the words of 'Plaisir d'amour' in relation to the poet's sorrow of the moment-but why now? More important surely to consider the ambiguity of Pound's news that stays news in view of the two immediately available meanings of stay-leaving out the one that had to do with whalebone corsets. Stay as in 'Linger awhile, thou art so fair!' and stay as in stop any further thing from happening and let us have an end to news."

"The poet is clairvoyant. 'Ne dure qu'un moment'-and our moment had only just gotten under way."

"Yes, well, it's easy to make predictions, is it not-especially concerning the future."

"Yogi Berra. We had a yogi on board."

"And yet one insists there must be more to it all-pictura loquens-than tick-rock, Tag aus, Tag ein, E pluribus unum and ashes, ashes, all fall down. The cultured young cry out, 'Do tell us about-we want to hear allabouteveryfuckinglastoneofem, Notes and queries, Q. and A., relating to the many consequential initiatives with which they became closely involved. The laughs the frowns, the upsandowns all first nature to them then and not in short, in long, the works. And unlike some in the city we do have all night.

"But unlike the authors of the long dispatch again to hand-who saw themselves, it seems, not as the bowler-and-stick vaudevillians they were, but as twin rhapsodes of mock-epic caliber, exuberantly flinging out their random paradoxical teasers as substitutes for Apollonian objects of contemplation, their fiery emotional effects as substitutes for Dionysian enchantment.

"For they were clever ones, as we soon discovered. Students of Comparative Literature no less, possessed, we saw at once, as we read through their unsettling text, of adroit, cool, and penetrating insight into theme, motivation, and character, keen in their primitive, exuberant ambition to get it.

"Fresh as paint their grasp of ideas introduced in Auerbach's Mimesis, and wielding an altogether more subtle knife than those blades thrust into the hands of the slashers recruited by the semiotic vogue. Determined to represent by annotating the fluctuations of their attitudes, as well as what they perpetrate and undergo, men's characters, and women's, too.

"Cruising our ranks in unobtrusive fashion during the intermissions, then later at the Crossroads Café dissecting us all down to the bone as an experiment in adaptation and exploitation. And if as it turned out what they were not so good at as they were at allegory and the grand design was smoking out a tail, and thus did finally fall into our clutches, their like never did come about again on the line."

"Don't you think they wanted to be caught out all along? I always did."

"That they made us making them? I suppose so, except that what they seemed to think they were up to the whole time was making us up. The crust!

"That said, we, all these years later making ourselves making them making us do not unroll our design in transparently allegorical fashion. Rather we allow them to unfold themselves as does life itself, which can be either tracked or lived, but never both simultaneously, according to both the uncertainty principle and the phenomenon of self-similarity. In this we are in our fashion true to our many darlings and also appropriately postcontemporary chaotic.

"We care little for plot or for the thudding sameness and strained expectation imbedded in it, seeking to reduce all experience to a carefully tabulated, weighed, and balanced succession of ratified incidents-one fucking thing after another, culminating in the uncovering and publication of the truth that will rock the world ... right to sleep.

"For us such schemes have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, as were police reports and journalism for Sherlock Holmes. For in general it may be said of postmodern writing of serious intent that in it, the function of the narrator is just that, no less, no more-to fucking narrate, all right? To describe the fluctuations of movement. He is permitted speculation in time-slip chronicles solely on approximations of distance and duration, and of necessity, that he may be seen as anything but omniscient, on his own infirmities of character and intellect, especially those concerned with the illusion of self-determination, as they are the very ones that tend to support the more preposterous asseverations benighted readers have been encouraged to believe they have been vouchsafed as gospel, beware of the dog.

"Nothing reported concerning the fluctuations of gesture, no speculation on the motivation, or lack of same, in any character-so many spinning in an ever-narrowing gyre-may be confidently taken as read, merely as read about-candidates must write on one side of the paper only; this margin to be left blank for the examiner.

"That also said, in mitigation directly concerning the exercise of free will, and mindful of the conditions that must necessarily obtain in order that our narrator may competently answer the decorum of a legend, any and all remarks acknowledging the constant presence-in-absence of the distant, the strange, the far-out, and further typifications of the scarcely known must be accommodated-imprimatur, nihil obstat-so long that is, as no notion of roman à clef is entertained. We're out for ummediated, unadorned truth here, and not for floods of spurious verisimilitude-dreaded analog to the symptom of flooding in a psychosis.

"And a good thing at that, given the tendency of tropes to mutate-indeed mutate into life itself, taking command of the text altogether, making its story their story-so that it may be said of certain texts not so much that they are lifelike as that the reading of them is like the experience of living. No book can live two lives, mar dhea.

"Because for the slab of a thing to be read as a true roman à clef, according to the latest postmodern formulation forensic multiples: a survey, they'd want to have more keys on their turnkeys' rings than are turned clockwise on any given day up the Hudson at Sing-Sing-and that's straight from the source, sparkling and bottled on the premises in clear glass.

"Moreover, we don't care what people do-in fact they can do it in the streets if they like-alarums and excursions galore, fife and drum, and the monkey wrapped his tale around a flagpole. More power and good luck to them now there are no more horses likely to be frightened by them-certainly not the noble steeds of the mounted police. Our attitude will remain that of still, calm, tranquil contemplation with open eyes, gaze unaverted, a state which beholds the images boldly presented to it and declares 'just so.'"

"Still and all," she observed, "whoever they turn out to be, they should be doing something worthy of note to attract the world's indulgent attention-something, indeed, besides vibrating."

"Agreed, and with the proviso that we shall remain less interested in what they are up to just then than in what they are thinking of getting up to or remembering what they've gotten up to before, we don't wish to stop them, or see them stopped.

"Not for long anyway. Only long enough to freeze-frame and cut into them, to examine in cross section their motives, means, and opportunities, to arrive at some sense of their origins beyond the bounds of sense-should anybody anywhere anytime wish to know just what's going on-the accurate depiction of primal conflicts being ever better served by allegory than romance. And then, somehow, to reinstigate fluency from what has been halted.

"And in their own words, not in the words of avid narrative adepts whose accounts inevitably climax with hair-raising escapes for some-all colors and lengths of hair at that-leaving hearts beating out of chests all around the town, and for unfortunate others, catapulted bodies splayed at unnatural angles on outcroppings of jagged rock. Absolutely not. Our inspiration is drawn from Maupertuis and his principle of least action, forerunner of quantum mechanics."

"In their own words."

"A debriefing."

"Had they a brief?"

"We know they did-to follow the lead of Mawrdew Czgowchwz."

"Where to?"

"Where to. Well, in the end I see us all together at the Grand Hotel, each in his own room, reading the emergency instructions on the back of the door, prior to dressing for the coming occasion, then going down in the elevator to the lobby to await her descent down the great staircase to get into the limousine, us following along in taxis-"

"Not you, you always rode in the car."

"Didn't I just. In any event, surely to the opera house."

"And what is she singing?"

"What else but Minnie, of course, her favorite role."

"It was-still is. You know, in murder mysteries, I've always liked best the ones with everybody gathered in one place and they each and all have a motive."

"Interesting projection."

"Oh?"

"What else, when it was yourself up there on the stage slaying them all."

"You've forgotten not for the first time either."

"How neglectful not-for the first time either."

"Like a serial killer."


Etc:
* Podcast: James McCourt, Edmund White, Camille Paglia, and Alan Hollinghurst discuss gay literature and queer theory on NPR's Bookworm
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*

p.s. Hey. ** Bill, Thank you, and I know they would thank you too if they knew and could. I really didn't like 'Prometheus'. I thought it was heavy handed and gaseous and kind of leaden. As I've said before, I think the really underrated and fairly amazing Ridley Scott film is 'Legend'. I think that was the end of his short great period, i.e. 'Alien', 'Blade Runner', 'Legend', but there are some good stretches in 'Black Rain'. 'The Duelists' isn't bad. ** Sypha, The head! No, not the head! ** Steevee, Tosser is an interesting fellow. I suspect that with his pretty yet masculine looks and streamlined twink-meets-streamlined-hunk torso, he probably does all right. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, T. They are few and far between but, gosh darn it, I remain determined to ferret them out. Interesting comments are even rarer than interesting profile texts. I agree that they add this whole other great thing, but finding them really is like looking for goldfish in garbage bin. Your yesterday sounds to have been heavy, yeah, and rich and lots and lots of other things. Beautiful about her letter. That's amazing. That sounds very sensible about letting them decide what they need to hold onto. I hope you had a good, restorative sleep after that. ** David Ehrenstein, I like Jack Black's acting too, most of the time. I wish he didn't have that sub-SNL frat boy comedy rock band Tenacious D, which is one of the most annoying bands in the world, to my mind. But, yeah, he can be great. I will absolutely for sure skip 'Boulevard' now, not that I would ever have seen it in any case, but, ugh, that sounds horrendous. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, I think going ahead makes a lot of sense. Automatic is nice. It's mod. It's acid. It's cool as a cucumber. ** Bernard Welt, I too was most happy when, having found that escort and thinking his profile had possibilities, I enlarged that particular thumbnail to find the final piece of his puzzle. Ha, I immediately thought of Malcolm McDowell too! Sorry about the mislead re: the 5, but that is good to know. Dang, well, call me old fashioned, but I did have a quiet hope that he truly was passionately and exclusively excited to talk with you about film. Not that he wasn't passionate. About film, about everything. ** Gary gray, Naturally the anarchist escort had a big place in my heart this month too. I'm very glad you're doing good. And you bursting into tears actually sounds like a sign of goodness to me, but I am weird. Oh, thank you for being into my latest novel again. And my imaginations likes from where and how you entered it. Dreaming of others is nice. Perhaps even the spice of life, as some say. That thing that has guys excited in the States ... you mean getting to see Justin Bieber's butt? No, I think you mean legalized marriage, right? Yes, I certainly heard about that. See, well, there's where the whole 'dreaming of others' thing comes in, you know? There are those, and many of those, in fact, who are very happy now, and seeing other people happy is a wonderful thing, or it can be. ** Misanthrope, Wickedness assuredly has its place, I think, and a fine place it is. That pigeon's poop was modest, a moist speck, hardly worth even mentioning. Geese! I've heard of them. They're like cooler ducks something, right? There's some hominem that was popular once upon a time that had the words goose and gander in it. I can't remember it. When I think of geese, I think of a lake. I think of geese, in a group, departing the surface of the lake on whose surface they had been resting, and taking to the skies, at first in a low then sweeping upwards angle while the sound of their feathers coursing through the air temporarily drowns out the sound of leaves barely shifting about in the trees astride the lake. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Right? That sentence was almost really, really good. I was very tempted to line-edit it into perfect shape, but that would have gone against the rules I've given myself about those posts. Big structural change, interesting, of course. I know how that goes. Oh, that ripple effect thing always happens to me because my novels are so intricately interconnected structurally and on the surface. Corralling the ripples? You mean so the rippling effect on the surroundings dies away at a particular, calculated point? It's hard to advise in a general way about that because, for me at least, every instance is pretty particular. I mean, asking yourself if the newly outer rippled prose is worth the revision is good. I often just follow them, yeah, but you can also get habitual about revising and lose sight of the overall. I guess just make sure you're giving each ripple effect attentive oversight, which is what it sounds like you're doing. Our film has been rejected by most of the big festivals, which isn't a huge surprise. It's a difficult film in an unusual way. We came within a hair's breadth, half-a-hair even, of being selected for the film festival that we most wanted the film to premiere at, but, even though the festival higher-ups really like the film, they feared dealing with the controversy it could create, so they played it safe. I think we know where the film will premiere, but we're waiting for confirmation. As soon as I finish the hopefully final draft of the script for Zac's and my next film, likely this week, then Zac and I will start working on the TV pilot. Gisele wants to direct a mini-series for French television, a puppet show -- much weirder but not totally unlike the kinds of puppet shows that used to be common decades ago on TV in the States (Shari Lewis, Howdy Doody, etc.) -- and Zac and I are writing the pilot for the series. The puppet and the puppeteer/host are already selected, and it's just a matter of writing an episode that makes French TV buy the series. ** Cal Graves, Way too much ... good plus bad, I'm reckoning? Hang in there. Pretend you are a magic sword and everything is liquid. Just don't throw away the started/ abandoned little projects whatever you do. Seriously, save them. I've gone back and finished half-started projects ten years afterwards sometimes. I'm good. No, Bastille Day was a bore. I had semi-firm plans with two friends, both of whom blew me off. Don't care, though. It was okay. In fact, I can answer your zoo question because I'm currently very excited to go the new, or, rather, recently reopened after a ten-plus year closure and revamp, Paris zoo, and the only reason I want to go is ... let me see if I can find a photo, hold on ... Click this, and you'll see the fake mountain range. That's the magnet for me. What's your favorite zoo part? I am reading the script for Zac's and my new film as I try to revise it to perfection. What are you reading? Your Walmart sounds nice. I'm not kidding, I mean it. Gosh, my enormous pleasure about 'MLT'. If-a-certain-someone-from-my-past-arrived-via-time-machine-in-my-apartment-right-now-I-would-feel-exactly-how-you-feel-ly, Dennis. ** Schlix, I know, that was a goodie, right? I got very lucky. Oh, shit, about your computer. It's boiling hot here already today, and my computer's internal fan is going all Merzbow. Holy, shit, Uli, about the ears and vertigo and numbness thing. Yeah, that's incredibly stressful even to hear about. The osteopath helped to some solid degree, you say? I'm pretty sold on osteopathy. Jesus, man. Your ears are still ringing? That is so strange but, obviously, I'm very happy to hear that you're through the worst of it. Hugs, and, there's nothing I guess I can do, but, if there is, don't hesitate. Hugs, my friend. Love, me. ** Okay. I decided to resurrect this long unavailable post. James McCourt has to be one of the most under-recognized great American novelists, and I encourage you to head in his work's direction. See you tomorrow.