PORTRAIT OF AN IMITATION HEDONIST

. . . . .

This week I found Will Self's 2002 novel, DORIAN An Imitation, accidentally on the shelves of my college library. I had forgotten how much I love being inside of the library. A silence so large it is breath, of which I'm only a small version. Libraries for me always feel like a restful futuristic dome, a room at the bottom of the sea, buried in the blue omphalos where I exist, only partially alive, half-blind, floating through the stacks like a ghost automaton, touching and searching.

Self's novel is a portrait of a dissolution of the flesh by decadence, by an age of cultural extravagances, the perils of early debauchery as well as a contemplation and partial criticism of gay culture since the rise of the AIDS epidemic.

"Don't spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type. Don't make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don't decieve yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. . . the world has cried against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found."

These are the words of Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's 1891 THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, and they give us an insight into Self's contemporization of the classic. Dorian, in the original, is haunted by a painting of himself done by Basil Hallward, which embodies all of the terrors of age, anxiety, debauchery, guilt and crime, while Dorian himself remains a picture of an ideal young beauty. He ultimately murders Basil Hallward, and in an effort to destroy the only piece of incriminating evidence, the painting (which now drips with blood and mortality), knifes his own inky image only to break its spell: the police find a mutlilated portait and the body of an old and wasted man, murdered on a parlour floor.




The original novel helped to incriminate Wilde in the (in)famous criminal case in which he stood trial for homosexuality. Wilde, of course, is the first author to be "gay" as such, and Self's version is a contemporary telling that could have been penned by Henry Miller, for all of its vulgar wit, perfect irreverance and its remorseless descriptions of tasteless and frank sexual decadence. It's deliciously sick. In it, Dorian is the "type" of young gay man all of the media attention about AIDS awareness in the 80's, the MTV reality voyeurism of the 90's, and the flamboyant outing politics of this web-lit decade, has made possible. Dorian is young and beautiful, but also out, sexually fabulous, white-party hip, taking part in all the fashionable drug recreations, having almost forgotten that AIDS afflicted generation of the 80's, but still vulnerable to its very real dangers. He's new to the scene, but part of a generation who feels entitled and unafraid of making a venemous public display.

In Self's version, Dorian is the subject of Basil Hallward's avant-garde video installation--Basil Hallward of Basquiat and Warhol notariety--and also the young pupil of Henry Wotton, the insanely wealthy hedonist, closeted and married, drug addicted, brilliantly supercilious Brit. The story ensues: Dorian remains young and unafflicted by age and AIDS. The invention of Self's version is that Dorian becomes a demon, insatiable predator for experience, drugging, corrupting, even raping and murdering, all under that perfect disguise of the charm of his undying beauty. At his own party he infects both Basil and Henry, and proceeds to travel the world like a mogul socialite while his "friends" are left to discover the truth. Basil struggles, rehabs, falls off the wagon, is taken in by New York Dragqueen Trannies, rehabs and tries to turn a new healthy leaf after he finds out he's HIV positive. Henry Wotton, on the other hand, seroconverts and spends his money and time on drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs and drugs. In his sardonic vision of the world, he ironically tells the truth about Dorian, finding a fictitious version of a murderous, deceitful Dorian more interesting than the real, so he thinks, innocent and all too stereotypical, young twink. "I adore destructive spectacles," he says, sucks on a cigarrete and exhales, "they are the last refuge of the creative."

DORIAN, in effect, is the lens by which Self examines the era of gay political selfhood. Out of mid-seventies sexual liberation of the bi-dolls, into the confusion of the 80's secret epidemic and into the 90's newfound culture of tops, bottoms, fems, bears, twinks and republicans, a crime story unfolds parallel to the original, complete with Basil's murder, the blackmail of Dorian, and the final distruction of the tapes, on which the AIDS ridden, murderous, despicable Dorian dances around like something out of Dante--the ring of hell where people dance and laugh in madness after eating their own shit:


"Dorian sprinted straight into this garden of earthly delights. He not only accepted the hands grabbing at his crotch, the drinks shoved in his mouth and the tongues pushed into his ear, he revelled in them. . . He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of his watch! And that's exactly what he did: he loosed the strap of his chunkily expensive diver's watch and thrust it into the hand of a deranged clone, one who was so taken by Dorian's beauty that he licked the face. . . They were draped in chains, the men who jostled and clinked in the Stygian chambers beneath the bar-room at the Mineshaft. Dorian penetrated this sphincter of darkness. He stopped to try his cock in a gloryhole, he paused to watch while two men fucked a third at either end, he moved to join a circle of happy flagellators, he critically pissed on a naked performer in a bathtub. On and on he went; darker and danker it became, as wonkily partitioned room succeeded warped vestibule, each filthier and ranker than the last with the odour of faeces and semen and poppers. All around was the thwack of flesh on flesh, with its ragged accompaniment--the grunts and moans of effortful coition."


This novel is titillating, and might catch some readers off guard with its sexual deliberateness, but it's also a smart, lyric, racing meditation on the Keatsian ideal: youth and beauty cursed by a human struggle against mortality. Self's achievement is especially satisfying if you're gay, since it comes to us at the speed of our culture these last few decades, that have so rapidly changed how we view ourselves among ourselves, as well as how we stand in relation to others. Critics might surely accuse Self of indulging in a negative stereotype of gay culture, but he is writing a novel, afterall. I, for one, am grateful to be entertained by my own darkness. Sell self-help and political-moral doctrine to someone else. Anyway, it's not as if this novel doesn't accomplish a real vision of the world as it is, underwriting our own complicated relationship to it. . .




What I love about the ending to this novel is its epilogue. Where the novel could easily and satisfyingly end after the fourth chapter, at the apparent destuction of the artwork, Self's ability to take everything a step further with both satire and a strange, disturbing, critical eye for gay life as a culture, ultimately proves immensely interesting. Without giving away the ending, Dorian survives, for a time, distracted from his true nature by a lifestyle fueled by appearances and capitalism, much like some people I know today:

"Busy, busy, busy. In May alone there were 2,456,707 hits on the CATHODE NARCISSUS website (www.cathodenarcissus.com). Visitors to the site could view Baz Hallward's original installation, together with other examples of the late artist's work. Sponsored and maintained by the Gray Organisation, the site featured links to GRAY magazine, as well as a photo-file of Dorian's own career in modeling. . . Dorian wanted Baz's work to become synonymous with male beauty at the end of the twentieth century. Male beauty and a new mature pride in homosexual identity--not a pride based on militant identification with an underclass, or a persecuted ethnic minority, but the true pride that came with assuming the responsibility proper to an era, when for the first time gay men and lesbian women were openly assuming positions of power. . . As he bickered over the bill with friends--some gay, some straight--in a Greek restaurant by Primrose Hill one Sunday afternoon, it hit Dorian Gray with sickening suddenness . . . All of us childless, Dorian thought, looking about him at the edgy bantering of his social sibling-substitutes. All of us--relatively speaking--rich, all of us unencumbered with any true, organic responsibilitiy. What's it all for?"

And, then, there is the snide voice of Henry Wotton to rebuke him: "You're all completely interchangeable: cocks, arseholes, jeans, brains. That joint you were in last night was like a swap shop at the end of the world, wouldn't you agree?"




Even if you're not interested in a "gay" novel, per se, you're sure to be drawn in by Self's re-telling. It's peopled by characters both straight and gay, curious and compelling, decadent and disastrous. The plotline not only carries the arc of the original, but assumes comedy and wit as it invents contemporary personas in contemporary predicaments. In the end, this is a novel of political description coupled with Self's burning lyricism, a work masterfully driven by the polar twins of our sensual being: beauty and destruction.

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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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THERE IS NO RED AT NIGHT

The title of this entry is from a few lines of an early poem by Beckian Fritz Goldberg,

I tell you there is no red
at night, and in the rose only a place
where the eye blows out.

I might be misquoting here, or dreaming it up, but I swear I remember reading this in an old apartment building as a student. My late nights caught with an oreo cookie half eaten in my mouth and some poem I couldn't get enough of. I remember the moment of re-reading this, and then re-reading it again. The negative attention that enacts a sensual image and simultaneously erases it--the way these lines forced me to see a color while they told me it never existed--was particularly powerful for me as a reader. Subtle irony, but more importantly they focused my awareness onto a kind of psychological drama. Enacted within, these lines said something about what language could do. The spotlight wasn't on the poem anymore, but on my own perception of things. I was seeing with the poet's eye. The poem taught me to read, but it also read the world from within me. There are lines in Jean Valentine's work, I think, that echo this kind of negative capacity: "there is no book and my name is written in it." I can't remember the titles of these poems, but the lines are in my head for years. I love the negative space they illustrate, the intuitive, poetic place, the otherside, the underlanguage, their intimation of death, body, and loss.

In Fritz Goldberg's newest book, THE BOOK OF ACCIDENT, she returns to her old themes--things we see in her first book BODY BETRAYER--and accomplishes something new with that old narrative approach. This is a book of stories, post-modern fairy tales of 20th century children, children that get tattoos and tongue-piercings, children who are dangerous and lovely. Immediately I think of a poem in her first book "The Children Dream Death" and remember that it is a child's imagination that can be cruelest. Right now on t.v. a commercial for marine recruitment: a young 19 year old marine is holding a toy airplane, commenting on the importance of technology and spyware to save lives--I'm reminded that our childish insights are simply forgotten, but they hardly disappear. Our dream cruelty shows up, ends in real disasters, murders, wars. Those old sci-fi movies with all their hidden political commentary are evidence of a way we predict our own destructions through play. So here is Fritz Goldberg telling stories, both fairy tale and sci-fi thriller. In the tradition of the narrative, we have the stories of Skin Girl, Wolf Boy, the Torture and Burn Boys, as well as poems that allude to and caricature the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the end we have a commentary on memory and dream, real violence and imaginary horror, as well as our attraction to the sexgore of the television age, the videogame era, in which we are desensitized against vulgarity in all its forms.

What interests me stylistically about this book is the way narrative takes shape. We might think of Dobyns CEMETERY NIGHTS, Popa's WOLF SALT, or Hughes' CROW as precursers to a book like this, except that Fritz Goldberg's meta-narrative takes narrative into the 21st century. There is a departure from her early work here. Even though she's pursuing a narrative shape, her poems begin to hybridize lyric abstraction with traditional story. Take for example this poem:

"The Absolute"

Finally I gave up and became the rose,
all those treacherous peaks of my sleep
around me and only one eye
in the fold . . . Such time,

flouncing its dress, rests, essence--
inhumanly sweet. Green serpent head,
tongue flame, blood-lettuce, easing
bodice, breasts on the balcony,

breasts on the balcony. No one
to say where I came from
wasn't good enough--

My lips of many mansions,
gorget upon gorget, slit
upon slit where the blade pulls out
and the plush rushes up--

No one to repeat
what I said when I was drunk.
No one

to object to the recounting and recounting
of the fragrances of the tower of you--

Absolutely
no one to be a woman

in the life that had already
the look of pure attachment,

fire to the stalk.


Remarkable first for the confusion: Is this a dramatic monologue? A confessional poem? A poem of praise? To some extant it's monster of all three. I think of Neruda's early poem in which he writes

The parracial rose devours
and climbs to the peak of the saint:
with thick claws it fastens
time to the wearied being:
it swells and blows in the hard veins,
it ties the pulmonary cord, then
lengthening it listens and breathes.

This strikes me as a particularly erotic masculine language, where a rose "swells and blows in the hard veins / it ties the pulmonary cord, then / lengthening it listens and breathes." What the rose enacts here is masculine orgasm. Fritz Goldberg's "Absolute" is embodied by a different langauge, something akin in tone to Plath's "Letter in November" where she writes,

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist-high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Fritz Goldberg begins a kind of ode to the rose which becomes an ode to womanly body, and to body itself that swoons: "green serpent head/ tongue-flame, blood lettuce, easing / bodice, breasts on the balcony // breasts on the balcony." But the praise becomes witchcraft as the speaker offers us confessional material: "no one / to say where I came from / wasn't good enough" and later, "no one to repeat / what I said when I was drunk. . . absolutely / no one to be a woman." The spirit of the poem is inhabited by a new surrealism in which the mirroring of two objects is not complete. The speaker and the rose have the same life. The speaker is half-woman, half-rose, and we understand this beauty in the eros of its sadomasochism: "my lips of many mansions / gorget upon gorget, slit / upon slit where the blade pulls out / and the plush rushes up." Iambic, these lines also employ something of a sprung rhythm, enacting the rush of the bleed of being, alive and falling, alive and unable to be anything but the flaming repetitions of a sight that is human, desirous, deathbound. We might think of great Russian heroines, that threaten and allure. Of course, the fact that the rose is described in metaphor that recalls the female sex is new as well. The idea of a "pretty" rose is abandoned, and much like the language of say, Mebdh McGuckian's CAPTAIN LAVENDER, female sexuality is here afforded imagistic violence. We might say this poem re-writes that stereotype of the lovesick schoolgirl. Here the rose is standing in its own vision, rapt with itself--and isn't this the nature of desire? That to see is to feel something, until we're coming undone from within? Don't we need a woman to tell us about it? Don't we need a woman's body to dare to see, to dare to desire with the flesh--until it changes us? Doesn't a dream like a desire change us? To swoon alone, to "the recounting and recounting / of the fragrances of the tower of you"--the "you" addressing both the desired-after and the Self. Rose Self. Death Self. Self longed for with Pleasure. Flesh-petal, because we see and we fall apart with our longing. And as we fall apart we love our deaths, because our body is speaking its dark orgiastic vocables, its un-coming-dones, the language of "only one eye / in the fold"--our consciousness in the "those treacherous peaks of [our] sleep." Yes, since pleasure in Fritz Goldberg is always linguistically awake. Pleasure that imagines through a sculpted sound, until what we see is what we are when the "eye blows out." Until we have ourselves become the negative selfspace of her poem.