For the past ___ years, I’ve been neglecting my guitars and amplifiers; for example, I stored my ‘blackface’ 1960s Fender Princeton Reverb at my friend John’s house, and everything else sat in the forgotten recesses of closets, which is not exactly the best thing for intonation (in the case of the guitars) and — for some reason in the case of the amps — reverb, which was shot on both. After the long, slow and oddly painful (via ‘learning to be an adult’) denoument of my old band Saturnine, I wasn’t sure that I would ever really want to play any of them again; they seemed to represent a feckless quality to my youth that had left me careening from one pursuit to the next, without ever really considering whether I had sufficient skill/talent/devotion to ‘make a living’ at any of them; at the same time, the idea of doing anything ‘as a hobby’ seemed ‘too mainstream,’ and so I ended up taking jobs that in most cases could not qualify as the foundation to any kind of traditional career, e.g., I sold lens-cleaning fluid, I watered plants, I worked at a record store, and — most humiliating — I ‘temped’ at law firms where my former classmates were a$$ociate$.

In retrospect, of course, all of this can be understood to represent a desire to fuck/buck/rebel against tradition without acknowledging the most obvious way in which I would never be traditional, i.e., the state of being gay/vext/non-heterosexual. This is also why when I see movies about wayward youths who have trouble ‘settling down,’ I tend to project my own past and conclude that he/she must be gay/vext/non-heterosexual, although I’ve learned to be somewhat more delicate in phrasing this opinion (if I phrase it at all) via all sorts of disclaimers, after being told quite vehemently on numerous occasions that ‘not every1 is geigh, u know.’ (To which I always respond with a smile and a nod and an unstated mental rebuttal: ‘that’s what u think.’)

But since subsequently working in a corporate office for almost 1000 years (via the evaporating publishing biz) and experiencing the true weight of ‘fiscal responsibily’ (via lawsuits and Manhattan real estate); I not only became more resigned to the idea that I would never be ‘Steve Malkmus,’ it was a thought that seemed vaguely disturbing and repellent to me, not unlike the way I think of myself as having ‘tried to date girls.’ But as much as I once tended to disavow the past completely, it has more recently occurred to me — via iTunes — that it was not a complete lie; I still genuinely love/admire much of the music from that period of my life — even if it’s not ‘geigh’ like Britney/Madonna/Cher/Coldplay — and moreover there was still a certain satisfaction to be found in writing/recording songs — via Apple Macbook — even if I no longer have a band with which to take them ‘on tour’ and play them to a thousand ghosts in as many empty rooms.

So I took a few months and gathered my gear; I drove to John’s house ‘in Yonkers’ and picked up the Princeton, I threw out ten bags of garbage that had accumulated in the closets on top of the guitars. I plugged them in and like any neglected child, each one had issues — there was hissing/crackling/moaning/howling — and I gradually set about finding repair shops, which due to the ‘vintage’ status of this gear is never an easy (or at least obvious) task in New York City. In the past I had used some stoner in the East Village for my guitars and a toothless genius/punk rocker in Brooklyn for my amps, but nobody seemed to know what had happened to either one of these guys, though everyone agreed it was unlikely that either had endured the most recent decade, which may/may not go down as one of the worst of all time (via Dick Cheney/Alan Greenspan/the Donald/Tumblr).

But eventually for the guitars I found a guy who (miraculously) lives/works on the Upper West Side, so that wasn’t too difficult, while amp guy was in the middle of Queens, where the grid system breaks down and Google Maps will torture you by say, directing you to take an exit from the Grand Central Parkway that doesn’t exist. But luck was with me, and both were technical savants, which you can tell pretty much instantly from the decor of an apartment/workshop, i.e., are there amps/guitars/wires/soldering irons/blowtorches everywhere and no art on the walls, except for perhaps an autographed shot of Stevie Ray Vaughan? (In short, these guys are never geigh.)

Today I picked everyone up and was informed that — after some minor repair$ and adjustment$ — they were all in excellent shape.

This has been a post in which ‘repairing your vintage guitars and amplifiers’ is a metaphor for ‘coming to terms’ with your past. (These guitars/amps are part of me, now.)

I have some vacation days coming up, and can’t wait to spend a few hours playing, even if nobody ever hears them sing but me.

Today I read a disturbing post on the NYT’s City Room blog about a pair of teenagers who broke into a vacant apartment in Brooklyn, doused a cat with lighter fluid and then set it on fire. According to the article, “[t]he cat was later ‘found outside crying, unable to move, but still alive’… It was taken to an animal hospital with severe burns, and was put to death.”

Coincidentally, I was reading Richard Rorty on the subway, who (via Judith Shklar) defines a ‘liberal’ — philosophically speaking — as one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing a person can do.

He also describes the role of fiction in our culture as a means to 1) empathize with those who are suffering and 2) understand our own capacity for cruelty.

It’s not difficult to imagine telling a story about two teenagers and their decision to torture a cat that fills both of these purposes: in terms of the kids, we might describe the bleak terrain of the neighborhood in which they were raised, the loveless existence they endured for the first ___ years of their lives, the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the hands of others; the slow escalation of mayhem and violence that led them on this particular day to hatch a plan for such a pointlessly repulsive act. We might even try to imagine them as they ignited the cat and listened to its terrified screams, and whether to witness this was as satisfying as they had hoped, or whether they looked at each other with a familiar expression of disappointment. What did they say as it happened? And later, did they laugh or cry or simply not acknowledge it at all, as if they had simply shared a bad dream?

I remember being in Paris 20 years ago, when I happened to go see A Short Film about Killing by Krzysztof Kieslowski; the story involves a young man who directs a taxi out into the countryside, where for no apparent reason he brutally murders the driver; he is quickly caught and sentenced to death, and throughout the proceedings shows absolutely no remorse or really any sign of ‘humanity,’ despite the best attempts of his defense lawyer. It is only near the end — after he shares a painful memory from his childhood — and as he is being led to his death, that we feel any compassion for him; in one miraculous shot he looks up at the lawyer, who is watching from the window above, and we understand from the prisoner’s expression that something has melted in him, that he no longer wants to die, and we — as the audience — no longer want him to die either.

In time, I may write a similar story about two teenagers from Brooklyn who torture animals and live to regret it.

But for now I would like to think about the cat, about how small and defenseless it was, and how the universe showed such little regard to its fate, and how in this sentence ‘cat’ is a metaphor for ‘any of us as individuals at any given moment.’

And how when we grieve, it is really for ourselves, and — finally — how we look to the sky with a certain anger and longing and forgiveness as we remember that despite everything — and this by turn cruel and comforting — we are still alive, at least for now.

It is in the nature of certain people (ahem) never to be satisfied, which — depending on the context — can be a curse or a blessing.

For example, I just finished a very delicious chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting (but not too sweet!) and am already aching for another. This is also why it’s sometimes better to leave the contours of life blurry, so that we can be distracted by questions of interpretation instead of fixating on crossing boundaries that all too often we realize in retrospect might have been better left uncrossed. But at the same time, relentless dissatisfaction can sometimes yield work of improbable beauty, and this too can provide a measure of unexpected relief.

It seems like the unhappiest people — by which I mean ‘the happiest’ — are those who never give in to either extreme, and exude satisfaction and contentment. I was like this once, until I broke my glasses and everything was a blur for several weeks. I grew to appreciate this, so that when the time came to pick up my new glasses, I told the optician to grind the lenses back into sand; this made me happy for a little while, until I grew fatigued with everything this new world offered, and more than anything else, I wished to possess what I had once had. Now that I am older and a ‘productive member of society’ I sometimes attempt to nostalgically recapture these extremes through photography, and intentionally blur images; I am vaguely aware that this is actually an exercise in memory, which is equally susceptible to distortions in the attempt to make them more beautiful than real life.

(American gay fiction writer and flickering beacon during the Dark Ages of post-war American fiction) James Purdy died today, and as so often happens, The Times obit neglected to explicitly state that he was gay/queer/homosexual/vext. Not that you could really hide it in Purdy’s case, given that the subject matter of his books so often dealt with such themes, and to be fair, the obit did not fail to discuss his work in these terms.

But according to our friend John — who is in a position to know such things — Purdy spent a lot of time ‘chasing after young men many decades younger than him,’ which I suppose is simply beyond what The Times is about to include in any obituary. Still, it’s fun to imagine: “As a gay man who lived in New York City for close to sixty years, Purdy was never partnered, but ravished approximately 40,682 men — many barely out of their teens! — and in his later years was never seen without a posse of young admirers.”

Although the obituary makes the case reasonably well that Purdy was an Important But Neglected American Writer — which is true (and if you haven’t read him, we recommend starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works) — there is a somewhat disturbing soullessness to the piece as a whole, a hovering ‘lonely bachelor’ aura that makes it feel just a little sad/stereotypical, as if Purdy was ‘a lonely and bitter homosexual’ without a trace of love or passion in his life. (Who knows, maybe that’s true.)

Or maybe I’m just thinking about how I would want my own obituary to be written, i.e., even if I had written 20 novels that were/were not critically acclaimed, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend/partner/spouse/husband (something ‘culturally sanctioned’ for The Times to mention) I would still want a few words dedicated to some aspect of ‘being human’ or perhaps just being ‘alive’ (by which I mean a capacity to feel/love, even if it’s not necessarily feelings for another person).

E.g., “An admirer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Purdy was known to make a point of walking across it at least 300 times per year.” Or: “In addition to writing books, Purdy collected flower-themed stamps, for which he held a lifelong obsession.” Or: “Purdy had a beagle named Stanley who for many years never left his side, and was often seen dining with him in restaurants.” Or: “Purdy loved nothing more than a good salad!”

When I read about death — and particularly about that of an artist or writer — I want to see some signs of ‘real life,’ some indication that perhaps this person was a ‘lil obsessive’ and not just a robot in the bourgeois capitalist society/factory in which we’ve all been slated to pass these recent decades; if it’s not there, the risk is that you put down the paper (a metaphor) and think ‘what’s the point?’ which is a completely different level of neglect, and one that none of us really deserve.

Today the sky was windswept, which reminds of when I first moved to New York City and me and my friend Mike were walking around the Lower East Side one night — it was definitely winter — and we saw what could only be described as a tumbleweed that blew across the intersection, not far from where we stood with our mouths agape. We were both big fans of the Meat Puppets, of course, and as we continued on our way, we discussed the song “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” from the first Meat Puppets LP, a song I just learned — via Google — is a cover of a traditional folk song. Not that we would have cared about this at the time: we were only interested in the past so far as it extended back no more than ten-fifteen years (which seemed like a long time then), i.e., to the glory days of SST Records.

If this — to see a tumbleweed in Manhattan — happened now (assuming the entire LES hadn’t been transformed into an upscale shopping mall), we would no doubt have taken a photograph or video of it and posted it for everyone to see, but for us it became a memory that we shared and was one of those goofy jokes/events that I suppose — once you share enough of them — forms the foundation of any friendship. For years after we would say to each other, “do you remember that time we saw a tumbleweed?” (This was no doubt annoying to those who missed out or refused to believe such an improbable truth.)

Perhaps one casualty of ‘the Facebook age’ is a sort of passive destruction of any part of the present not documented with some kind of photographic (or via e-mail) textual reference; it’s almost like we don’t have to worry as much about filtering things out in our daily existence, because we can always do it later. I’m no less guilty of this, of course; I didn’t keep a journal on my recent trip to Europe, because I literally took a thousand photographs and will rely on those in the event I want to remember something.

Once I saw a tumbleweed blowing across the windswept streets of downtown Manhattan.

Because I didn’t take a photograph of this, it may or may not have happened.

Like fewer and fewer events in the modern age, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

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“My Back for Thirds”

Here I looked around
In your dream I hit the ground
I was bringing something wrapped in silk around to you
But it was nearly cut in half
You cried as if he hated you

Here you made your plans
They might work I understand
We all want a second chance
To clear this haze from our eyes

Burning like the sun you seemed to sink away into the night
Watching this I almost died
And knew that I could never sleep
I’d rather know my dreams were clearly hated and despicable
Filled with clowns and Ponzi schemes
Cheating with your memories

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.

I first met Leanne in the fall of tenth grade in the Kingswood dining hall.  This was my first year of boarding school and — residual fear from public school — I was still petrified at the thought of eating alone; I don’t remember if I circled the cavernous room looking for someone I knew (preferably from the boys’ dorm or the hockey team) or whether I went directly to the emptiest table on the edge, where she and her best friend Mary already sat, clearly not interested in the throngs who populated the middle of the space.

Leanne — who I think had skipped a grade or two by this point — was dressed waifishly in khaki pants and a man’s flannel shirt, and still possessed the androgynous charm of a precocious child; only her shoulder-length hair, wavy with bangs and indifferently styled, pushed her more toward the girl’s side of the equation. Mary, dressed similarly — and with short, shiny swimmer’s hair and broad shoulders — seemed even more ambivalent about adorning herself with the trappings of the more traditional — and popular — segments of the school, who chattered away en masse only a few feet from our table.  As it turned out, they were extremely conscious their separation from the “mainstream” of the student body, but — revelation to me — framed this in terms of class, not gender; though they were both “day students,” Leanne and Mary were not from the posh suburbs surrounding the school — Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham — but from further afield, although the exact names of these towns now escapes me. In this respect, they were more like the boarding students — who tended to come from more middle-class environs — but because the girls who boarded were a smaller and more insular group, it made sense that — at least at this juncture — Leanne and Mary were outsiders from almost every vantage point.

Although I — as a hockey player, book-smart, and with conventionally masculine good looks (which I say with no pride, and perhaps some shade of embarrassment) — was the opposite of an outsider, a fact that may have begged the question of exactly what I was doing each day eating lunch with self-professed “losers” like Leanne and Mary, they obviously appealed to the nascent dissatisfaction I felt for so many facets of my own life at fifteen. I think my presence egged them on, as if I had entered a private theater, a sort of performance of two in which I was the only audience member. Leanne was the ringleader and the wit; her down-turned eyes, along with a small bump on her nose and a strong chin, seemed to possess an inherent melancholy that made her observations — usually either an extreme form of self-mockery or just mockery, particularly when it came to money and what it bought for those around us — all the more outrageous; Mary would quietly gasp in agreement and laughter as Leanne threw her head back in hilarity and sometimes waved her thin arms around — almost daring the world to notice — as I watched paralyzed with awe at the urbane quality of what I had implausibly found in the suburbs of Detroit.

It would be fair to say that I fell in love with Leanne in every way except the one that mattered, or at least required some definition; it would probably also be fair to say that my feelings were reciprocated, but only for a little while, until it became apparent that I would remain cruelly aloof, no matter how inwardly charmed I was by the long letters she sent me over Thanksgiving break describing the horrors of a car trip to visit her grandparents in Florida.

We remained friends — and possibly even good friends — throughout high school, and I think she generally regarded me with a sense of stupefied affection, as she — and no doubt others — wondered what my problem was, when the answer was so obvious as to appear completely unlikely. For my part, I watched from of a distance as she gained popularity among an alternative crowd of “faculty brats” and assorted “boho” types with whom I was also loosely associated; more than anyone I met at Cranbrook, I had the sense that she was simply biding her time before being released to the world at large, which she would undoubtedly conquer.

As luck (or bad luck) would have it, we both went to Cornell; she was the first person I saw when I arrived on West Campus in a cloud of hopeless dread, knowing that I had made a huge mistake, compounded by my agreeing to live with a childhood friend in the freshman-football dorm (an arrangement made to please both sets of parents, predictably enough). But Leanne was nearby, and for one night — this during orientation — it was like we were in tenth grade again, and we walked through the teeming crowds, wondering openly how everyone could be so stupid, and yet at the same time so oblivious to their stupidity.

After this, we quickly lost contact. My academic career was marked by a program of laziness, subversion and ambivalence — i.e., I majored in “Government” — and for friends I sought out those whose aura appeased my own vague need for self-differentiation, but without ever forcing me to elucidate the underlying reasons for this; in short, I gradually attached myself to some of the fine-arts majors. Leanne by contrast quickly established herself as a “star” in the creative-writing program, and became popular in a way that seemed a thousand miles away from the person she had been in high school; when we saw each other, our conversations were brief and superficial, as if neither wanted to remember where we had come from while distrusting the other for knowing the truth.

After I moved to New York, I occasionally saw Leanne at parties in Brooklyn. By this point we were “adults,” and reflected somewhat more candidly about who we had been, although as someone who remained closeted, there were severely enforced limits on how far I would allow myself to go in this regard. Nevertheless, because she retained her brilliance I felt a little sad when she married a writer and seemed to give up her own aspirations, as if they were my own. After this, our friendship — if it could even be called that — became increasingly attenuated (not out of any malice) and at some point I learned she had gone to architecture school.

The last time I saw her, I was finally “out”; I remember feeling nervous, as if I should apologize for how dishonest I had been, yet at the same time searching in her eyes for some sign of the person who still lived in my memories, which was no doubt an unfair burden to place on both of us; for who could possibly live up to the naive, unformed expectations of a fifteen-year old? Though I would have liked to dwell on the past and exactly how it had contrived to push us to this point in the present, we were at a crowded art opening, and so talked aggressively for a few minutes about her job as an architect and my obsession for old bricks. (Only later did I realize this obsession was both literal and metaphorical.) Though understandably distant, she still seemed impossibly erudite — and even good-natured — as she pointed me in the direction of obscure artists and design theorists whose work might reinforce my own tendencies. We traded e-mail addresses, but neither followed up.

Although I knew she remained in the city, and it would be quite feasible to track her down, I preferred to think of her as elusive; and here my inclinations seemed to be reinforced when, the last I heard — via a friend — she was quitting her architecture job and going to Africa.

She recently appeared to me in a dream, and it took only a few seconds to locate her on a professional networking site on the internet. I made no effort to contact her, though; it wasn’t that I lacked the desire to see her again — the tug of nostalgia almost reduced me to tears as I remembered her laugh — but a sense of stinging remorse that I felt certain would descend upon me in the minutes after such a prospective meeting; but even as this occurred to me I realized that this, too, was an exaggeration, and in fact, I was more than prepared for either scenario (i.e., to meet or not to meet her). Then I felt redeemed by a greater certainty that what had appeared to me was a symbol of my own youth, and one to which I was more than ready to say goodbye.

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

As many of you may or may not know, last year we wrote an essay that was published by Gawker on Valentine’s Day as part of a “Gay Modern Love” contest sponsored by Sheila (miss u!) and inspired in part by our rants about the heternormativity of the Modern Love column in the Times.  We thought we’d take the opportunity to reprint the essay this year because a) we’re lazy, b) you never know if Gawker will have its archives up forever, c) we’re still kinda proud of it, and d) it reminds us that life is not always as difficult as it seems, or even when it is (and worse), there’s sometimes a silver lining worth holding on for.

It’s late November 1998. I’m 30 years old and a total closet-case: it’s past midnight and I’m scrolling through the men-seeking-men listings of Web Personals. During the day, I still like to tell myself that—although I’m not exactly a virgin in the same-sex department—whatever homo tendencies I have are basically a minor health problem; in short, as soon as I meet the right girl, I will be “cured” of the desire to say, head out to Prospect Park at 11:30 on a Tuesday night or—as I have been doing more and more as the days grow shorter—take a walk through the virtual hallways of the internet…” There are three categories to choose from: relationship, friends (“as if”) and sex. (Guess which one I go for.) Among the ads that catch my attention (and this being 1998, there are no photographs) is one from a 41 y.o. GWM, 6’3″, 240lbs and hairy. Although I’m somewhat deterred by the “G,” I imagine a strong and vaguely angry-looking man with a buzz-cut and receding hairline. Moreover, he doesn’t use the term “bear” but “linebacker,” which appeals to the hockey player in me. Why this gets me going is an unsolved mystery at this point, but it most certainly does; in an agitated state, I send off of a reply: 30 y.o. GWM 5’11″/175 looking for…(whatever the equivalent of NSA was in 1998). It’s the first time I’ve ever used a “G,” and while part of me doesn’t like it, I figure if it gets me what I want, nobody else will ever have to know.

A few days later, I get a response in my secret “Gay-O-L” account. Stephen suggests we meet at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen. For me, the intervening days and then hours are marked by repeated mental games of “what the fuck am I doing” and interludes of queasy anticipation. When I arrive and look for someone matching his description, I am nervous—what if he lied?—and generally relieved that it’s five o’clock and already completely dark outside. But to my astonishment, when we find each other, he is not only all of the above—as if molded from my dreams—but has the most intense green eyes; one glance leaves me more naked than I’ve felt in my entire life. My head is filled with an onslaught of distortion and melody; for once I am living one of my all-time favorite Hüsker Dü songs. My fingertips—the same ones that have memorized every note of Zen Arcade over the past decade—itch with anticipation. I try not to dwell on the implications of this, and think only of the night ahead.

Inside we order coffee and spend a few minutes talking. It turns out his “linebacker” description was a bit of a red herring; though he looks the part, his knowledge of sports is nil. Moreover he works as an opera director; not coincidentally, he has been out since the beginning of time. I don’t initially respond to this as we marvel at the power of technology, which has brought together such an unlikely pair. We ceremoniously thank the internet and imagine ourselves as circles on a Venn diagram with infinite degrees of separation.

“And what about you?” he finally asks, expressing (at least as I read it) a mix of real curiosity and—if not disdain—coy skepticism. I’m sure he knows that my “G” was a bit of a stretch. For the first time ever, I’m actually bothered by not being out. I feel ignorant to have worked in a record store for five years without knowing one thing about opera besides “Pavarotti.” (And worse, that I have done this in the wake of graduating from NYU Law School.) I think it might not be so cool to share an apartment with 1000 of my Brooklyn friends and cohorts, even if we did build a sound-proof rehearsal room in our basement that’s home to an equal number of indie-rock bands; or so impressive that my own band has five records and tours, or that we made the top-thirty on the CMJ radio charts last summer.

I finally decide to answer him directly: Nobody knows. (That is, except a few anonymous strangers.)

“Not even your mother?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What about your friends?”

“Nope—no one.”

He nods slowly and I try not to think how this must look. To my relief, his beautiful eyes remain placid, forgiving and even desirous. After all, I remind myself, it’s only sex. I change the subject. “Where did you say you live?”

“Uptown—Washington Heights.” Once again I have no idea what he’s talking about, but decide not to make my usual quip about never going above 14th Street.

I ask him what led him to move there.

“I’m a bit of a recluse,” he says, before explaining that it’s cheap and that he doesn’t mind being an outsider; sometimes he even prefers it. Unlike me, he has only a few friends he sees rarely and is not particularly “close” to his family. As I listen to this, my mind begins to race as I picture myself in his shoes. What would I do without my friends? (Where would I get drunk?) If I came out, would they forgive me for selling so many years of lies? And my family! All of my older brothers and sisters, married with children, what would they think if I ever described our relationship so perfunctorily, with such distance? Equally disgusted and intoxicated, I could suddenly see myself like Stephen—a recluse—obsessively devoted to the most queenly pursuits of silverware, mid-century modern, Schopenhauer and alpine gardening.

He laughs as he considers me, and seems to understand what he represents in terms of both yearning and doubt. “So—do you want to come over?” He places his hand over mine for a second and removes it.

“More than anything,” I say, and now—ten years later—his is a destiny I am happy to call our own.

(Image via Gawker).