On your entry tonight, The Tsarina remarks by quoting Henry Miller (1941):  “There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”

[Via reader CBNY.]

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.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how much we still kinda h8 the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’  Though we know that many in ‘the community’ consider this a ‘settled issue’ — and perhaps this is a vestige of our own self-h8red, which is not small by any measure — we still generally feel uncomfortable identifying with either term beyond the most perfunctory shorthand, like when d-bags in the locker room are talking about how they want to ‘bone some broad’ and they look in our direction for validation we’re like ‘stfu — we’re gay.’

We went to dictionary.com and looked up gay:

Gay –adjective

1. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music.
2. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments.
3. given to or abounding in social or other pleasures: a gay social season.
4. licentious; dissipated; wanton: The baron is a gay old rogue with an eye for the ladies. [Ed. wait -- what?]
5. homosexual.
6. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.

If  you’re like us, none of these definitions remotely captures anything about your life, except maybe numbers five and six, to the extent that it’s synonymous with “non-heterosexual.” But as we all know, “homosexual” is a scientific term invented in the late 1800s and thus cannot be used without sounding like you’re an animal in the zoo, e.g., “Yall, let’s get a grant to study the homosexuals! We heard that they have enlarged brains/thumbs/swirly hairdos/six-packs!”

So what about queer?

–adjective

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang/Disparaging and Offensive a. homosexual. b.effeminate; unmanly.
6. Slang bad, worthless, or counterfeit.

We understand the idea of ‘reclaiming your identity’ — kinda like how all the kids on the subway call each other ‘nigga’ — but do you srsly want to be called queer? We don’t! (Might be ‘too old’.)  ‘Columbia University has excellent academic programs in Nigga Studies and Queer Studies?’ What makes one soooo much more ‘acceptable’ than the other?

While many of you may or may not agree, in either case we suspect you’d like to challenge us to come up with something better. After all, these terms have many decades of history/study behind them, and it’s possible to envision a day 100,000 years in the future when they might be entirely divorced from the superficial/derogatory meanings from which they originally arose.

Our solution is vexed.

1. irritated; annoyed: vexed at the slow salesclerks.
2. much discussed or disputed: a vexed question.
3. tossed about, as waves.
4 [Proposed as of 2k9]. non-heterosexual.*

*Although we don’t ever endorse the use of adjectives as nouns except in an ironic context — ‘the gays were upset that Madonna/Cher/Britney canceled her tour’ — we propose the alternate form ‘vext’ to allow for similar uses, e.g., ‘the vexts lobbied hard in Albany/DC yet achieved nothing despite Democratic majorities in both houses.’

Seriously, how much more ‘empowering’ and — especially w/r/t definition number three — poetic is ‘vexed’ than any other alternative? It’s basically like saying: ‘Don’t fuck with me/us,’ while maintaining a certain and appropriate degree of intelligence and impatience (but not anger or violence, which we don’t support) for mainstream convention that frankly needs to be a hallmark going forward in any interaction with those str8s who don’t ‘get it.’

Try it out. ‘Yall, don’t talk bullshit to me about _____! I’m vexed!’ In politics. ‘Yall should be able to ‘get married’ if you’re vexed.’ Or for students of literature: ‘Marcel Proust was the best novelist of all-time; not coincidentally, like most great novelists except during the dark ages from 1945  to 2010 — he was vexed.’ Note also that ladies are equally welcome to be vexed, and won’t be appropriating a tired old term like gay, which inevitably makes them (as usual) second-class citizens on the gender front.

We are not gay or queer.

We are tossed about, as waves.

We are vext.

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.

You’d be surprised how often ‘str8 bros’ write in to tell us how ‘wrong’ we are in our assertions that this or that is homophobic, that we really shouldn’t be offended by something that’s ‘not that offensive,’ that we’re actually hurting the ‘gay community,’ or that our anger is ‘misplaced.’ More than once we’ve been told that we ‘need help.’

It kind of reminds us of 100 or so years ago when various people with whom our relations had soured encouraged us to go to therapy because we were ‘so angry.’ What they couldn’t have predicted was how this process — i.e., therapy — made us understand more clearly than ever how justified our anger was, given — and here’s the irony — the offensive actions of those who had encouraged us to go.

So listen up, str8 bros: if you’re going to make a prostate-exam joke for laffs, develop an ad campaign based on the negative connotations of a man’s face in another man’s crotch (or any other similar non-heterosexual innuendo), or whatever other bullshit joke you want to make at a fggt’s expense, be our guest.

Just don’t ‘get upset’ when we call it homophobic or more-stupid-than-funny, or tell us that we have to laugh at it, or ‘understand where you’re coming from.’ And when you have failed to convince us, please don’t write to tell us your life story and how gr8 you are because you ‘have gay friends,’ or that your prostate exam made you feel as if you had been ‘kicked rlly hard in the ballz’ or had ‘the wind knocked out of you.’ Finally, please don’t encourage us to write to Andrew Sullivan to ‘see what he thinks,’ as if he were the god of all things geigh.

A question to our str8 lady friends: how do you put up with obnoxious bros who try to ‘tell you how to feel’ after they’ve insulted you?

Because mostly we want to direct these bros to the George Washington Bridge, where they can jump off and never be missed.

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.

In the fourth book of 2666, we are presented with something of an encyclopedia of the literally thousands of crimes (99 percent of them against women) that occur in Bolano’s fictional border city of Santa Teresa — modeled on the real Juarez — over a period of perhaps ten years, with an emphasis on those who were tortured, raped, mutilated (sometimes but not always in the same horrible way) and murdered, and whose bodies were most often found in the desert or an illegal dump or a remote ravine or ditch.

For the most part, Bolano describes these murders in the distant, clinical tone of a medical report — or sometime the more hard-boiled prose of a detective novel — and gives a short summary of the investigative follow-up, which invariably dissolves into the case being “shelved” for all of the usual reasons (apathy, no clues, lost evidence, no resources, horrible bureaucracy, possible cover-ups). But even as the mounting atrocity of the events described threatens to paralyze us, there is enough nuance and lyrical beauty to the prose, so that we are like a victim beaten down and increasingly horrified that these murders could continue for so long, with so little apparent repercussion to those committing them.

Which of course begs the question of who in fact is committing them, and here Bolano also has an amazing ability to draw us into the many different possibilities, while identifying none as dispositive. There are drug dealers and pimps and rich capitalists — the factory owners who hire these women — who may or may not be involved; there is a creepy “gringo” who “seems like” a serial killer and may or may not be orchestrating kidnappings/murders from a prison, even after he’s arrested; there are government officials who may or may not be in league with the drug dealers and pimps and capitalists; there are the police, whose baseline level of misogyny is so high as to be completely demoralizing as they laugh about all the different ways a woman can be raped; there are men in general in this society, who are brought up to view women as subhumans, and there are women who for whatever reason become enmeshed with these men; above all else, there is capitalism and money, which trumps even the most violent of crimes.

Bolano gives us all of this and more, so that by the end, we have no choice but to indict society, i.e., ourselves, because while Santa Teresa (and Mexico) may or may not be a special case, it’s clearly less (of a special case) than more. In essence, it’s hard to emerge from this book without a conviction that we are all guilty of these horrible acts.

It could probably be argued that Bolano’s reflection of reality in this regard is a little too realistic for purposes of a novel; is it really necessary to introduce us to so many characters and leave their stories unresolved? Ultimately it didn’t bother us, because underneath the brutality his work resonates with a compassion for the murdered women — or women in general — that leads us as readers to care about what he’s describing, even if we know — like in real life — so little of it will lead anywhere.

One question we continue to ask is exactly where Bolano stands with regard to the gays. Although Bolano (unlike 98 percent of U.S novelists, who obv prefer to ignore the issue completely) is to be commended for weaving — what? an awareness, a motif — a presence through the text — e.g., “[a]s you’re well aware,” says one character about Mexico, “this is a macho country full of faggots” — it cannot be doubted that 2666 is pervasively homophobic to the extent that virtually every character — from university professors to blue-collar cops to outspoken feminists — when offered even the slightest opportunity uses it to express nothing but disdain for limp-wristed faggots or fudge packers or whatever else. (There are also brutally violent prison scenes of men raping each other — and worse.) While we admire the truthful tone of this hateful treatment of faggots in Bolano’s work, so far we’ve felt none of the compassion he shows for women; it leaves us a little wistful, knowing that in this fictional world — like the real one — we are somehow even worse off than the hundreds of desperate whores left to rot in the desert and be picked apart by the vultures.

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

Click through for “hi-quality” on YouTube or watch on Facebook.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.”

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

There are times when we cannot believe how long we’ve been alive, and concurrently, how long — assuming a regular life span — we still have to go. Though admittedly it’s a thought that most often arrives during an afternoon meeting at work, it also crosses our mind at random moments in the middle of winter, when everything seems frozen and permanent, or during an unpleasant commute, or waiting in the dentist’s office, or really any number of things we are required to do that offer nothing but the tedious certainty that life is really nothing more than a pit of quicksand in which we are slowly sinking. (Oddly this never happens when watching teevee — no matter how bad the show — which is both its gift and its curse.)

It goes without saying that as we get older and accept more “responsibility,” we worry more than when we were younger. Money, our health, the health of our children the cats, the fear of dying in Washington Heights, the fear of not dying in Washington Heights; all of this and more relentlessly plagues our thoughts with an intensity we could not have imagined even ten years ago, which makes our future seem like a mountain that gets steeper and icier with every step forward, but which offers no possibility of retreat.

During these moments of existential despair, we look back at the course of our life and it seems that every time we reached a fork in the road, we went in the wrong direction. Why did we do x, we wonder, when doing y — an option that would have been simpler — would have spared us so much hardship? Why — instead of using our natural talents — were we so intent on squandering every advantage? Why did we search out those who wished us nothing but harm and misery? (Why do we blog/Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook?) We think of others — lottery winners, acclaimed artists and writers, teevee stars, anyone who owns a 2br/2bth apt south of 96th Street on the west side — with seething jealousy, given what feels like a certainty that their lives are so much more pleasant and joyful than our own. How did it happen that so many people are younger and smarter (and richer) than us, when we used to be so good at math and scored in the 99th percentile on ever standardized test we ever took? Why did we spend 10 years in a band, when 1-2 would have more than sufficed?

But this passes as we acknowledge an (admittedly delicious and decadent) inability to really do anything about anything. It’s like when we were in law school; the first semester we couldn’t believe that our entire grade would be based on one three-hour test (no quizzes, no mid-terms, nada), but by the second semester, we could not imagine ever going back to a system in which we would be tested more than once a semester.

In this way only does life offer a common denominator: all memories (like dreams and perhaps even regrets) are created equal, and all paths lead to the same oblivion.

In the third book of Roberto Bolaño’s epic 2666, we leave behind the maybe-psychotic descent into madness of Professor Amalfitano for a broader type of madness known as the fringes of modern/capitalistic civilization. Bolaño does this by way of a Harlem-based reporter who goes by the name — for reasons never fully explained — of Oscar Fate. His mother has just died, and we follow him on an assignment that takes him first to Detroit — to interview a former Black Panther — and then to Santa Teresa, the fictional Mexican border city where hundreds of women have turned up murdered in the desert over the past decade or so.

Initially sent to cover a boxing match, Fate becomes at first intrigued and then enmeshed in the local “culture,” a bizarre and thuggish (and macho and obvs homophobic) netherworld. Bolaño’s prose takes an appropriate turn toward the noir; if Fate is not a detective per se, he uncovers tantalizing facts in his adventures in Santa Teresa that may or may not shed light on the outstanding questions of who the mysterious author from the first book is, whether he too is in this Mexican city, and what this may or may not have to do with the murders. Whatever the case may be, there are few people Fate meets who don’t seem to be guilty of something.

So it happens that we become the true detectives; we read with a cool detachment that perfectly captures the sense of unreality we associate with trips to a foreign country, most obviously, but also in our daily lives. Bolaño captures that stunned moment when we ask “wtf are we doing here?” before we spend a few more seconds looking for clues in the deluge of senseless details with which we are all confronted. That there is never a clear answer to this question does not always prevent us from asking; then we stumble forward, perhaps with some recognition (or hope or fear) that this in fact is our Fate.

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