Shame - a memoir

This post is a fictionalized account of a true event. Many details, large and small, have been altered for the sake of artistic effect.

Newark, De - March 1978. Sir Angus Wilson, author of A Bit Off The Map, Kipling, Anglo Saxon Attitudes, Death Dance and, most recently, As If By Magic is a visiting professor of English literature
at the University of Delaware's Newark Campus. - Wilmington News Journal, 3 March 1978.

Sir Angus gave a reading one Thurday night. Craig and I decided to go and invited the smitten Scotty to join us. " He sucks with absorbent lips", Craig had nicknamed him after a middle-of-the-night nude tussle in the flash of a dying fire. " My dear, it's utterly Women in Love." We were friends again, taking turns playing Anthony Blanche and Lottie Crump and our other favorite literary characters.

The visiting novelist cut a Victorian figure with his red face and luxurious hair. He commented during the reading that no reviewer had seen fit to mention Wilson's homages - quotes, really - from Beardsley's Under The Hill and Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. " Mr. Wilson, I haven't read de Sade but I did read Under The Hill and I didn't catch the .."
Wilson gave us a meaningful look and said " It's a chapter heading. ' ... how they tousled them and mousled them ...the rorty little darlings."
"Our little friend has never been mousled," Craig said, indicating Scotty, who was helping himself to yet another glass of bad sauterne.
This conversation occurred, not in some den of iniquity, but in a hastily decorated "social room" across the street from the auditorium where Sir Angus read. Everyone seemed half tanked except Craig, Sir Angus, his tough looking companion Joe and your humble correspondent. I don't know if Sir Angus was a reformed drunkard or the victim of some dreadful malady whose treatment required abstinence from alcohol. There had to be some good reason for him drinking Fresca.
"Well, someone should teach him the mechanics of mousling."
Craig nodded. "Have you ever been to Rehoboth Beach?"
" Oh dear. No, I haven't. Joe, what was the place with the lads who had a shop?"
" Lads? Them old queens? Llhooze, there's a ferry to New Jersey."
" Lew-es. It's a nice historical town but all the action is in Rehoboth. You should come back home with us. My wife went to visit her sick mother. We'll have casa Craig all to ourselves."
"Ah, well.."
"Craig."
"Yes, er, Craig, that's a very exciting invitation. What do you think, Joe?"
"Angie, if it suits you, I'm all for it. Are there clubs, Craig?"
" There's a dance pick up club that's busy on weekends and there's a place called the Nomad. The fishermen drink there all day and after they're gone, it transforms itself into a gay bar."
The half quaalude Craig had given me must have kicked in because there's a deep ravine of forgetfulness until I wake up, fully clothed, in bed with Craig.
"What happened?"
" I'm not sure but judging from the noise Scotty got mousled last night."


Sir Angus and Joe spent the weekend with us. You won't find any references to this impromptu orgy in Margaret Drabble's exhaustively researched biography. You can learn more about Sir Angus' dirty weekend but only if I get enough comments.

Fame - a memoir

In May 1977 my friend Craig and I went to an Ann Beattie reading in D.C. We'd been reading her stories faithfully in the New Yorker, these tales in which little or nothing happened, usually written in the present tense. If she can do it, so can I. The audience at the reading were kind of sickening and precious. They made little noises of appreciation when Beattie said," I decided to call this story 'Distant Music' ... I guess because we were reading Dubliners in class."
After the reading, there was the usual signing flurry. It was a Sunday evening but people had places to go.
I accosted Beattie and her husband David Gates on the street, outside Second Story Books.
" I wanted to ask you something .... but there were so many people."
"Yes?"
" The New Yorker's a pretty staid magazine. Don't they get upset about the pot smoking and stuff in your stories?"
" Actually, my editor Roger Angell is really good about that sort of thing." The bearded guy cleared his throat.
"Do you feel like a spokesman for your generation?" ( I was really obnoxious in those days.)
" Oh, no no no, absolutely not. I have to get my dinner. It was nice talking to you", Beattie said and zipped around a corner and out of sight.
I glared at Craig. " Why didn't you talk to her instead of hanging around like that? She probably thought you were a purse snatcher."
" I just went alienated all of a sudden."

A Movie I Wish I'd Missed

Tim Burton has a handful of impressive movies to his credit - the Batman duo ( one great movie might be cobbled together out of Batman / Batman Returns) Ed Wood ( a genuinely quirky biopic with what could be Johnny Depp's best Performance) Edward Scissorhands ( a messiah movie on a level with Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth) The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice and Big Fish. I used to be a real cheerleader for Mars Attacks! but it hasn't aged well. Sweeney Todd is visually gorgeous but doesn't warrant a second viewing. Even though the trailers looked hideous, I took in a matinee of Alice in Wonderland.
Vladimir Nabokov said that "some odd scruple" prevented him from alluding, in Lolita, to Lewis Carroll's "pathetic perversion." Tim Burton is apparently more scrupulous than old VN. He obliterates any trace of Carroll from his loud brutish film. Not only that, he can't be bothered much with the events of the titular book and its sequel Through The Looking Glass. Instead of a dreamchild, he gives us an insipid nineteen year old out of a bad Merchant Ivory film who apparently needs corrective eyeglasses.
I'd be dishonest if I said there are no laughs ( there are a couple real snorters) and no real visual jazz ( a few of the 3D stunts are truly impressive) in Burton's travesty. It's just that these odd glints of beauty don't compensate for a dull eyesore of a movie. Let me put it this way. Anyone who takes you to this film with designs on your person is probably the worst sort of perv. Just say " Not tonight. These damn glasses have given me a headache."

Films I Missed or Fell Asleep Watching 1

My favorite movie of summer 2009 was District 9. I was really excited and pleased that it got a Best Picture nomination, although I knew it hadn't a chance of winning. I saw D9 in a theatre. I didn't see Tarantino's Basterds until tonight. The idea of a QT WW2 movie didn't really excite me much. Deathproof had been so talky and awful that I really wasn't much interested in what our national film lummox had to say, or make of, the second World War European Theatre.
I was happily mistaken.
True, Tarantino's characters still talk too much. Some of his concessions are odd. He seems to have agreed to let Brad Pitt do his character in a bad George W. Bush voice. But it's the ways in which he makes this unmistakably a Tarantino film that are actually, well, almost enchanting.
The rest of the casting is good to fine, like the contents of a bookseller's catalogue. Christoph Waltz, even in his Springtime for Hitler moments, is a fine actor who's also great fun to watch. I was glad to see Julie Dreyfus again. She makes the most of a tiny role. Melanie Laurent ( cineaste Shoshonna) really surpasses Uma Thurman. Her character is as tough and noble as Jackie Brown. I actually did a little fact checking before writing this piece. Rod Taylor, who plays Churchill, is that Rod Taylor, the one known to scifi movie fans old enough to remeber The Time Machine and First Men in the Moon.
Basterds is a really satisfying, even elegant film. It's not as good as Verhoeven's Black Book but it's good enough to mention in the same sentence. I'll have to withhold judgement on Tarantino's next project, even if it's a gangster version of Firbank's Sorrow in Sunlight.

Book Proposal - CONTAINS SPOILERS

Didn't someone write a book about contemporary male identity as seen in the popular / semipopular films of 1999? I just watched Fight Club after not seeing it since its' release. Forgot how comic it is and also how davidcronenbergian. Really. Elements of Dead Ringers, Scanners, Crash etc. are compressed into one film. As I watched Tyler and Marla watching those buildings collapse, I tried to remember if there was really that much fin de siecle' anxiety in 1999. Who am I kidding? The televangelical / teleprophetic crowd was working the Y2k angle for all it was worth. I worked in a bookstore and filled plenty of orders for some truly worrying survivalist books. We didn't know how good we had it.

Schoolboy Cinema : Another Country

Another Country poses the following question: did the English public school system, with its' cruel little hierarchies and fledgling young-boy-networks, turn Guy Burgess against Western capitalist heterosexual civilisation? Guy Bennett ( Rupert Everett) and budding Marxist Tommy Judd ( Colin
Firth) despise their school. Judd sees the school as a training academy for the bourgeois status quo. Bennett regards it as the enemy of homoerotic feeling and love.


They're both right.