BEAUTIFUL GROTESQUE: A new accessory for the UGLY EARRING

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Natsuo Kirino's new novel is a brilliant contemplation of the idea of beauty itself. As in Goya's charcoaled atrocities, her book skillfully portrays gruesome human intimacies, offering us the troubling character studies of Japanese school girls turned prostitutes.

The unnamed narrator and older, uglier sister of the mostrous beauty and destructive nymphomaniac Yuriko ("My first man was my father's younger brother Karl") begins the novel:

"Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look like if we were to make a baby."

Already we're on the scent of some Freudian destiny like a curse! This is a murder-mystery that is as much an inquiry into the biology of human hatred as it is a contemplation of the sexual-political dynamics for women in our time.

Throughout the novel the relationship of the narrator and her sister Yuriko (half Japanese, half Swiss) paints a portrait of sibling loathing, from childhood jealousies to Yuriko's eventual murder. Where Yuriko embodies the superficial, but socially real superiority of those deemed physically beautiful, our narrator represents an intellectual master who seems to plot all of the figures of the book against one another like chess pieces as she descends into a personal game of emotional disaffection. Here, she deftly explains the dynamics between Kirino's character types:

"Not yet adults ourselves, we sought to protect ourselves from potential wounds by turning the tables on our perceived aggressors and being the ones to launch the attack. But it grew tiresome being a constant target, and those who clung to their injuries were surely not destined to live long. So I worked on refining my maliciousness. . . "

One thing I really loved about the novel was Kirino's marvelous scrutiny of beauty as an ideal that results in an underscored commentary on the relationship between disparate social figures: upper-class politicians, middle-class workers, and the poor turned criminal. In her book, the layer of perception that affects romantic attraction between individuals also affects stereotypes for classes of people who are marginalized, especially prostitutes and illegal immigrants, who may lead unsavory lives, but who are faced with real economic and political struggles. The Chinese convict and murderer Zhang is ironically the only man in the book capable of offering a Japanese woman a real orgasm and the only person in the novel able to inspire real love. In this book, those on the edge of capitalist conformity must struggle with the whimsical fantasies of the inner circle of superficially rich (and symbolically attractive "beautiful people" marked by their wealth and political status) who have determined the hardships of the poor, forcing them into criminal depravity. On the other end of the spectrum is the character Kazue, who might be a feminist so extreme she ruins herself with her own sexual mobility as she transforms into a successful business woman who also prostitutes nightly simply because she can.

Much has already been written about the fact that Kirino's portayal of Japanese life is less than romantic, as it has been recently idealized by the U.S. media with portrayals of ancient refinements and emotional restraint, but what's really astonishing about this book is how her character studies offer us a post-modern but equivalent contemplation of the themes that obsessed Mishima and Nabokov in their era. Each of the girls in this novel pursues a different demon to equally devastating consequences. Kirino's prose is fresh and accessible, and her notion that human desire is itself a curse transforms girlhood into variable greeds of classical descent (sexual, economic, spiritual, political) each of them destructive and vengeful.

Friends and Strangers, Kirino's GROTESQUE is a real tragedy for contemporary audiences, complete with Shakesperean darkness and psychological warfare. This is a book of unexpected but timely Ophelias, returned from the drowning waters, stunningly alive, fully garlanded with opaque but ruinous obsessions, to take their place as major players in the outcome of our troubled kingdom.

If I had the money I'd buy you a copy!

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LOST NOTES FROM PRISONS AND FLOWERS

Late last night the nightabyss opened from within like a blue flower. The television watered. I walked from my cup of coffee to the black door and listened. I held Rigoberto Gonzalez' new book of poems, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers. My ex lover was asleep in the next room, I was here, lit by the black lamp of my coffee. There is a Silence underneath things that comes undone, Undead Duende. The hinges come loose. We fall through ourselves. The stars are spies.

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The book jacket says of Gonzalez' work, "this book is a testimony to sexuality in times of violence . . . expressed through a dark eroticism reminiscent of Garcia Lorca and Cavafy."

Tonight I'll begin with envy, the lash.

This is West Hollywood, friday night, between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. Outside two Israeli men walk up the dark hill toward the cold wall of stars. They are yelling and singing their national anthem. They are shouting their drunken brotherhood like the shouting orphans of eachother's arms.

The book cover is beautifully written, but needling me. Something about it doesn't capture what I found brave, dangerous, disturbing about this work. I want to say something about the calling of this book, and what it does to me, what it might be doing to others. How is Gonzalez texting Lorca, Cavafy, and why isn't this an answer to my love? It's needling me--green, nervewild. But tread carefully here, o world of enemy lovers. This is worth hours in the nightabyss. Read it. Buy it. Steal it. But I want to descend here into its aspirations. If touch is a prison. . .

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Tonight on my ITunes I've got one song on repeat: "Battlestations" by Wham. Hot skip of a baseline and high chime. It's edgy and hot: All I'm trying to give you is a good time honay / Whydju have to keep on playing games with my head? / Used to be a babay when u had no monay / Now we spend more time in battle than we ever do in bed! / . . . Than we ever do in bed! It's a prediction of Madonna's Erotica before she met Lenny Kravitz. It's a phone message in french with an 80's torn slutlook. It's Music from the Edge of Heaven. Get it. Wear it out.

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Both Lorca and Cavafy write from behind the necessity of a mask. In the end what makes their work compelling is a kind of imposed restraint. In Lorca, metaphor is denial. The psychosexual drama of metaphor suppresses any kind of overt political statement, but also compresses erotic feeling into the intensity of imagery we expect from him.


Take his dark sonnets, poems where the dark lover is the summoned phantom of his victim. Blindness and boy love, the strength of his imagery lies in the intuitive psychodrama inherent to his hidden sexuality. Wound, you are the blue fountain of my cries. Thorn, you are impenetrable, the black prince of my flesh. Lorca, Supple Icon laid across my sleeping lover's torso. In Lorca, everything is the body, is blood and darkness and love. When Gonzalez is Lorca, he's whispering things like "the heart keeps pumping / like an anxious rabbit."

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Cavafy is pure daylight. His disguise is domesticity, tears in his hands one afternoon at the cafe. He's got his eye on a bit of sunlight striking the staircase to a secret room upstairs. He's sort of Republican Gay, conservative and private. He likes fresh yellow tulips in a white vase. Pressed shirts. Waxed brows and manicures. He's out, but can avoid politics by insisting on etiquette. It's impolite to discuss money, politics, and sex. So instead he's memory. Untenable men he once loved. Affairs to remember, a name, an age, the style of his haircut, the style of his death. His look is from a doorway he's too afraid to cross. Absence is the face of the young lover. When Gonzalez is Cavafy, he's privately remembering "the blame

of pleasure. The pain I exit no greater
than the loneliness that takes me to the bar.
He says good night, I give him back
those words, taking nothing with me that is his.
The front door shuts behind me, the gravel
driveway ushers me away. The rearview mirror
loses sight of threshold, house, sidewalk, street.




For Cavafy, loneliness is the condition of his love. Impossible they, him, you. Impossible pronoun, gazing upon the possible version of his own life.

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Why the editors compare Gonzalez' work to Cavafy, and to Lorca, has to do primarily with the fact that like these two, he takes masculine imagery and the homosexual relationship as his primary subject. In this book Gonzalez understands that the joys of taboo involve brutality as pleasure. But where Gonzalez departs--and I would argue that if his book is a brother to works by Cavafy and Lorca, it's not necessarily by subject matter alone--it's in his directness, his frank confessionalism, or the style of it. Yes--friends and strangers--style is the green needle tonight. What is most compelling about either Lorca or Cavafy's work is a result of their inability to directly address their sexuality. This results in poems of intuitive, political intensity--without acknowleging these realms at all. For Lorca it is a Blood Drama, and for Cavafy it is something recounted or imagined by a distance in time. Their real subject is desire, longing, and our inability to clutch the demon princes of our sight.

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Tonight's moon is a podcast. 1-800-I-Confess. Young Madonna, it's been half a night since I knelt before the cross of his love. The breath of the ex-lover asleep is rushing beside me like an orange tree at night, wrestling the cool attention of a wind. Two weeks ago my grandmother from Sonora gave me a bracelet made of tiny wooden santos. Virgens, guardian angels, Jesus with the pierced shield of his heart across his chest. Wear this, she said. Don't take it off, or you'll die and go straight to hell.

. . . . .

This is the beginning of the 21st century and in it we are all very post-Freudian-modern. If Lorca and Cavafy are unwitting poets of desire, Gonzalez is a sexually contemplative poet of psychological encounter and gay identity. In fact, this is why his work is dangerous, brutal, unforgiving: he is self-aware, scrutinizing, and unforgivably confessional, even if he's not confessing. In this respect, his poems, for me, have a more direct communion with say, Sexton, than either more fantasized homoerotic poets. I'm not sure Gonzalez' work is erotic at all. Sexuality is the realm of horror and of the divine, but not the realm of longing. Not the slow look, the swelling need. This book is a fugitive of that Keatsian lean and paused flower of the Almost, Imaginary Kiss.

More often, Gonzalez is Sexton: "I suspect / you slip your finger in me while I sleep, / expecting me to suck the menace out." Or, "My lover feeds and fattens . . . this keen scavenger / finds value in that vacancy and stuffs it / with himself--cock, finger, foot." He is scorned mistress, boy adulterer. His subject is his sexuality, how it reveals him to the joys of slavery, the transformative boundaries that are constantly crossed and re-written as he becomes himself a wounded lover. His body, then, is the realm of pleasure and belief and death: "the gulluble anus or seductive // cock, both easy / to please. What I love about this book is its frankness about gay sexuality, the dynamic of lovers without that presentiment of permanence and marriage that haunt and comfort straight lovers. We are fly-by-midnights--a wound tells us
at dawn we were loved.

We are, by nature, transgressive. Gonzalez is writing the brutal honesty of our lovesex in the confessional: "Before I kneel to kiss your cock I remove its cross and hang it back on the wall. To open your cheeks to expose the chalice of your ass is to find the pink lips of Catholics."

On the other hand, it's this very frankness that straddles the pole of vulgarity. How much of this confessional tone can we take, before the poem turns gross? I ask, not as criticism per se of Gonzalez, but as a genuine concern in my own work. For me, lyricism can save the vulgar from sounding crude, though I worry--it's difficult to live here on the edge of saintliness. We either achieve brilliance, or a bad diary entry. Mishima said the only hands that touch God are the Masturbater's.

For me this book wavers on the fringes of this worry. At times deeply

they'll hold
down the lonely
dawns for you.

At times these poems will bare themselves so perfectly you'll flinch and wonder whether you can bear it, the way Gonzalez bares a bothersome attention to sex itself, that we know is best when ugliest.