In the effort to be less ‘gay’ and less ‘reclusive,’ I’m ‘rebranding’ with a new blog written by ‘Matthew Gallaway’, which not coincidentally is the name I’ve used for my novel The Metropolis Case, which will most likely publish at some point in 2k10. I hope you’ll join me there! Please let me know if you love/hate the new design, or if you have any technical difficulties with feeds/subscriptions/linkage. Hope to see u soon — miss u! xoxo TGR

I’m going away for a few days/weeks/months. Hope you have a beautiful spring (via the mythical Helibores)! xoxo TGR

H8 Monday mornings, yall!

Srsly — it snowed!? Enough for a snow day?

We didn’t think so either.

Listen on Tumblr or download directly from the Death Culture at Sea site.

“Retromeme”

We all know the kind of people who never seem to leave
Sometimes they can help you by affirming your beliefs
Never trust a movie star to tell you what you want
We have come to reassess everything you bought

He liked the way the lipstick turned his lips a cherry red
You don’t have to understand to join the living dead
The first mistake I ever made was written into stone
Sometimes we don’t like to share how much we feel alone

Decades from the present hold a kind of unwrapped gift
If only we could get this back to everything we missed
Sometimes in the desert, I like to look around
At landscapes that are barren, but ones that I have found

My fifth grade teacher, Mr. W, was a large, macho man with a mustache and a tight perm. (You could actually be macho and have a perm in 1978.) He liked to aggressively talk about boys and girls “dating” and “kissing,” and professed his intention to treat us “like adults,” which all bothered me for reasons I couldn’t quite ascertain. (Beyond the fact that this was the first year we were going without recess.) He wore lots of cologne and had a big butt he covered with shiny black polyester-blend dress pants and thick, wide shoulders and a hairy chest he stuffed into wide-collared dress shirts. He seemed very stupid to me — he couldn’t spell “recipe” — and considered himself a “disciplinarian,” which meant that he liked to yell at the class a lot, if say, he surprised us with a quiz and (most) everyone failed or if people hadn’t done the reading. I’m not sure why I took it personally: I always did every scrap of homework, was one of the fastest runners in my grade — this counted for a lot among students and faculty — and was always at or near the top of my class in every subject. I had also played hockey for six years by this point, too, so it wasn’t like I was a stranger to large, macho men who yelled a lot. But I knew I hated him, and — though I could barely understand this at the time — it seemed like there was only solution to my problem: I needed to kill myself.

Because I was only ten at the time, and like some junior-varsity version of Harold — I had seen the movie — I wasn’t exactly adept at the art of suicide. For example, I spent an hour or so after school one day cutting the top of my wrist instead of the bottom, which only resulted in a nasty gash I covered with a band-aid or two and which eventually scarred over without too much difficulty. (When my mother asked about it, I explained that I had cut myself by accident on a rock while running through the leaves.) One night after watching Fantasy Island and Love Boat I decided to drink the cleaning supplies, but I couldn’t manage more than a sip before I relented and returned to bed, where I liked to stay up late reading Lord of the Rings or maybe Dune. I secretly wrote long suicide notes in red pen encouraging all of my (much older) siblings to follow their dreams and become famous and — for those who played hockey — to “go Division 1.” I reassured my parents that none of this was their fault.

For their part, my parents didn’t know what to do with me. Later I found out that they arranged meetings with the principal and the hated teacher himself, both of whom seemed very perplexed given that I was basically a model student who gave them no real problems to speak of (except for a crazy, desperate mother who was in their faces at these meetings, presenting them with a vision of her son that had nothing to do with the kid they knew). We didn’t have grades at this point, but I had never received an “unsatisfactory” in any of the fifty-thousand or so categories that made up our quarterly report cards.

I managed to survive to Christmas, when all of my siblings descended for a few days of bliss and celebration; but when they flew away, my depression reached a new low and I declared myself incapable of getting out of bed (which I had in the meantime stocked with more knives, carefully hidden under the covers, as if I might be able to complete in my sleep what I lacked the courage to do while awake). My mother — her eyes rimmed red with frustration — paced the hallways and finally my father came in to have “a talk” with me.

He explained that life was often hard, but that I needed to be a fighter and not a quitter. He brought up the example of my older brothers — fearless giants in my young eyes — and explained that they too had suffered in ways that I could not yet imagine, but they had proved themselves incapable of being brought down. In short, it was time for me to pull myself together and “be a man.” I did not laugh or cry as a result of this speech, but nodded and agreed that what he said made sense. I promised to do better.

As it turned out, the talk had the desired effect. The following day I got out of bed, (secretly) returned the knives to the drawers and resigned myself to returning to school.

We had new seats following the break, and it so happened that I was placed near two girls in my class to whom I had never paid much attention; they were neither popular or unpopular; they never raised their hands or talked unless Mr. W called on them. I obviously knew their names, but I had never said more than a few words to them “after school.” One day, however, I noticed during a break that they were calling each other by strange names: one was “Cardo” and the other “Lombardo”*: furthermore, I managed to catch a glimpse of a note being prepared by one in which a list was being prepared declaring who was or wasn’t a “Cheddaball,” which I soon gathered was a slightly pejorative term whose parameters were maddeningly (to my ten-year-old brain) mysterious, so that one person might be a Cheddaball one day but not the next. Once or twice, they informed me with appropriate sorrow that I was a Cheddaball, but that it wouldn’t necessarily last forever, and in fact, the following day I was relieved to be told that I had been safely (if not permanently, they warned) removed from the list. I had to figure it out!

*My memory is patchy here, and the names may not be exact.

In the days and weeks that followed, I also learned something even more incredible: there were at least two other girls in this secret society, about which I and — as far as knew — all of the rest of the students knew nothing. (Those designated Cheddaballs were — except for me — never informed but only silently mocked.) Nobody suspected the existence of this important underground conspiracy, least of all the hated Mr. W, who was often the biggest Cheddaball of all.

One day, I was informed that an exception to the society rules had been allowed, and I was going to be made a member. Accordingly, I was given a name of my own: “Jobardo.” At the same time, I learned that what determined whether you were or were not a Cheddaball was nothing more complicated than a color of your clothing, picked in advance by Cardo (or in her absence, Lombardo) so that none of the other society members would wear it on the following day and suffer the indignity.

It was not as if I lacked for friends before this point in time, but at this point — in this class, with this teacher — the friendship of these girls and their mysterious society was the salve I needed to cope, if not survive; the girls saved me from drowning in something I had yet to fathom. It was not as if I now loved fifth grade, but the aggravation — somewhat ill-defined to begin with — seemed bearable; moreover I had allies in my hatred of authority.

We remained friends for several years, until I left for boarding school and we inevitably drifted apart. (I grew more than a little embarrassed of my fifth-grade self, even as I confronted bigger versions of the same demons.)

I haven’t spoken to any of them in twenty-five years, but one of them recently “friended” me on Facebook. We didn’t discuss our past in too much detail, though; just a lil “Wall-To-Wall” on which we briefly alluded to our imaginary society.

These days when I wake up and get dressed, I can’t help but wonder if Cardo is somewhere out there, and if — by dint of her designation — I’m a Cheddaball until further notice; often it seems likely, but perhaps even more now than I did then, I understand that there could be much worse fates.

Today we sent out to our millions of followers on Twitter the following tweet:

Q: What post-war (US) novel best reflects the gay experience as BELOVED reflects the Af-Am exper? Me: Holleran/DANCER FROM THE DANCE (You?)

Nobody answered! We followed it up with another tweet:

Q: Did you ever read a post-war “gay novel” in school outside of an LGBT/Queer class? (If so, which one/s)? Me: No.

Nobody answered this, either.

It has been clear to me at many points in my career that if only I would write non-gay books I might have a wider audience, I might be taken seriously in a way I wasn’t.

– Andrew Holleran (March 2007)

Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.”

It makes us wonder how it came about that she would consider Washington Heights for even a second.

Did Angelina wake up one morning and say: I want to live in the most ruined and barely functional neighborhood in New York City, with sweeping views of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge, which has been my favorite bridge in the world since I first saw it as a child driving from ___ to ____ in the back seat of my ____’s car?

Or perhaps she’s going to be starring in a movie about the drug trade and wants to understand what it’s like to roll up and down Broadway in a massive SUV with blackened windows, laughing at the cops and expressing surprise/dismay at all the “white fggts” starting to move into the neighborhood.

Or maybe she’s a fan of The Gay Recluse!? (<3 u, Angie!)

Whether she moves in or not, we were struck less by the implausibility of it than a certain longing to see what would happen if she did.

Does she know that Washington Heights is a metaphorical and literal graveyard of shipwrecks and resignation, from which most of us who are lucky or unlucky enough to end up here can never hope to escape?

Maybe she will be the one to change this collective destiny:  maybe Angelina could live here for a few seconds and then leave forever, having taken in her share of the beauty — both architectural and geographic — yet remain unscathed by the ghosts of longing and torment with which the rest of us are so familiar.  After all, as US Magazine breathlessly informs us: Angelina “has owned or rented properties in three different countries in the past year alone.”

Or maybe this is too much to ask, even of her; maybe she looked out the window and was disturbingly entranced by the clouds gathering over her beloved bridge, at which point she instructed her driver to take her away from this place as quickly as possible, knowing that if she stayed any longer, she would never be able to leave.

[Thanks to Bennett for sending us the US Magazine article.]

Through the fourth part of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s epic treatment of many things, we were extremely forgiving of the many tangents and digressions that permeate the work; not only were we impressed by the obvious genius of the writer, but we marveled at his ability to seamlessly move between the lyrical, the clinical, the suspenseful, the psychological, the satirical and the philosophical.  Although we had a few complaints — the pervasively unredeemed homophobia, the fact that many and possibly all of the characters felt like constructs of ideas as opposed to living entities — we never lost patience with Bolaño; his world was lush and full of compelling contradictions, we wanted to know more about the hundreds of murders in his fictional city of Santa Teresa and how the mysterious German author from the first part — Benno von Archimboldi — would or would not figure into them.

Sadly however, the fifth part doesn’t deliver much more than extreme tedium, to the point where we begin to question our initial love for the book as a whole. Language that once seemed magical now comes off as indulgent and often masturbatory (not coincidentally a tired theme here), every plot twist feels like a chiche, and worst of all, the more we learn about the decreasingly mysterious author — Archimboldi — the less we care about him. Although we see a few characters from the earlier parts, there is no sense of evolution or really any insight (from a reading perspective) into why this part could not have come first or second or third.

Ultimately, the problem can be traced back to the structure of the book; in the first four parts, the tension builds and builds as Bolaño teases and hints at the mystery — and in some cases — conspiracy surrounding the deaths of the women in Mexico. No matter where he goes, we want to know more! But when he leaves this electric setting for the mundane upbringing — albeit with a liberal sprinkling of exceedingly wooden symbols, e.g., as a child, he preferred to remain underwater — of Archimboldi, we feel deflated and long for the mystery and strength of the previous parts.

In a few pages at the end of the book that practically weep with a sense of obligation, Bolano “ties things up,” but again we are past wanting to confirm what has become obvious and mundane.

It’s the same feeling we get watching a teevee series — the X-Files is a particularly apt example in this regard — that reaches its peak in a shadowy but compelling aura of mystery, but one we realize has passed as it soldiers on in mediocrity for several more seasons before finally being killed off.

Perhaps Bolaño should have ended 2666 after the fourth part, when our interest was at its height and we burned with questions burned about its outcome; as it turned out, this last part gained nothing and cost much, so that we ultimately close the cover with a sense of disappointment. We still strongly recommend that everyone read this novel, but with the understanding that sometimes questions are better posed than answered.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About the Crimes

Watch on Facebook.

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE is a teevee series for the internet. “City of Dreams” is a five-part episode set in Europe. Future episodes will be located in New York City.

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

City of Dreams (Part 4)

It would be a fallacy to argue that my location here in the shadows of the riverbank

in the company of another man about whom I knew next to nothing

was anything less than conscious.

I couldn’t say if the vision I saw was of the past or the future but I no longer cared

I took a step forward and then another, ignoring the chorus of screams in my head.

I approached the Russian, who stood up as if he had been expecting me. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I shook my head ambiguously. “I’m not sure,” I replied.

“Follow me,” he said and together we walked up the stairs into the infinite fog of the Parisian night.

Do you read The Atlantic? If so, be sure to check out this month’s ish, which has “Gay Sex” on the cover for a pull quote that says “Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually,” as if that could ever be enlightening in any context, and then — coup de grace — includes this lovely exchange from Jeffrey Goldberg on the back page “advice column.”

Is life after college really as monotonous and depressing as it looks?
Ben, Manhattan, Kan.

Dear Ben,

No. It’s worse! Just kidding. It’s actually a joy. Except for the prostate exams.

Ha ha — get it? — prostate exams are where the doctor (often a male) puts his finger up your butt, and what could possibly be “worse than”/funnier having something up your butt if you’re another guy!? Omg, that’s s0000 funny! It’s like — wait for it!!!! — when two men “kiss” or “suck each other’s cocks!!!” OMG LMFAO!

We love The Atlantic so much, because they’ve been on the “cutting-edge” of enlightened cultural analysis and “hard-hitting” investigative journalism for at least 1000 years (i.e., the dark ages). We’ll be s0000 sad if they go under in the downturn.