I think I told you, Sandro’s friends keep sort of jokingly inviting me to join their party. But that’s a little too close to home. I am going dancing with them though. The iPod rave is tonight!
As you can see, this was a fairly recent exchange we had about Obama and Clinton. Santutxo was enthusiastic about Obama from the get-go, but, as is his wont, he’s had a couple of unpredictable moments of jumping ship. For a minute there he got a McCain bee in his bonnet, but fortunately that was short-lived. Of course he’d love to see a woman president, and there are many things he likes about Hillary, but he’s very bothered by the fact that she’d be coming in on the coattails of her husband. He hates the idea of a dynasty. Bush II has been more than enough.
He got caught up in the skirmish between Hillary and Obama on religion when it showed up on the Yahoo! homepage. I have to undo a lot of nonsense from Yahoo! I had said that I thought Obama had a hard time concealing his own intelligence, and he probably really did believe on some level that religion was the opiate of the people. And I said I also thought that was true and I knew Santutxo believed the same thing, or something approximating it. Santutxo grudgingly conceded that, indeed, he believed something like that, even though, at this point in his life, he’s disinclined to align himself directly with a Marxist truism.
I did end up going to the iPod rave with Sandro and his friends. It was great. A thousand people turned out in Union Square, each one dancing to his or her own beat. And yet we were also kind of dancing together. I found it very beautiful. Every once in a while somebody would invite you to hear their music, or want to hear yours. I shared for a while with a Jamaican guy, and, briefly, a German techno tourist.
Antonin Artaud loved the Marx Brothers. He said that the moments of “boiling anarchy” in their films represent nothing less than the essential poetic disintegration of reality. When a lady topples over a sofa, or some goon whacks a musical rhythm on his dancing partner’s behind, “these events comprise a kind of exercise of intellectual freedom in which the unconscious of each of the characters, repressed by conventions and habits, avenges itself and us at the same time.”
I never found out what “very important” meant. Maybe it was enough that I said it was good to “feel free.” Santutxo suffered a lot in captivity. He still has nightmares. I told you, he’s very afraid of dying.
CHAPTER 4: ON THE MOON
Let us take stock of the situation.
Something did happen, of course, between me and the paramour, and it involved a purloined letter. But the various versions I’ve given you are all fictional – obviously. That pseudo-Faulknerian account of the hallucinatory fever in the Bamako clinic was particularly implausible. Dengue fever has an incubation period of four to seven days. It couldn’t possibly have happened the way I wrote it. Binh never could have risen to the top of the art world heap on the basis of such juvenile work as the “Nocturnal Emissions” series. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the excess of the scene with the snakes, or the one from the Marx Brothers. By the way, you earlier probably should have noted the unlikelihood of somebody like Santutxo being able to get a visa to come to New York to visit me and have dinner with Slavoj Žižek. I narrowly resisted using the other hilarious scene from Monkey Business to explain that one – the one in which each of the stow-away Marx Brothers attempts to pass himself off to immigration officials as Maurice Chevalier by singing that ridiculous song.
No, clearly, the catastrophic event precipitated by an undelivered message trapped in my spam filter wasn’t an art scandal, or a tropical disease, or a run-in with a crazy stalker, or a terrorist kidnapping. But it was humiliating, scary, sad, and funny – and full of intrigue, in both the French and American senses of the term. I can’t really tell you any more than that. And regarding the use of guidebooks for research: I suppose I should also apologize for that. It’s probably pretty evident that this novel was constructed out of some fairly questionable knowledge gleaned from Google, a small, arbitrary stack of library books, a few Netflix DVDs, and my bin of sent e-mails. I’m clearly not an expert in Israeli political fiction, Basque separatism, experimental digital art, or Malian pop music. I now know a little about all these things, but not a lot.
When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Mandarins, she really knew what she was talking about. Those were very thinly veiled portraits of herself, Sartre, Camus, Koestler, and their lovers and friends. And of Algren. The novel takes place almost entirely in the smoky Parisian cafés she used to hang out in, and a little in Algren’s gritty Chicago digs which she also haunted. In a letter to Algren, Simone explained that the title referred to the traditional elite circle of Chinese intellectuals. She said that that was an allegory for her elite little circle of French intellectual friends. The novel didn’t have anything to do with China.
Simone de Beauvoir did eventually travel through China, and she wrote a book about it, but she wrote Algren saying that that book “is not too good,” and that she hadn’t really put a lot into it.
She wrote that letter in January, 1957. By that time, her correspondence with Algren was very sporadic. In fact, this was the only letter she wrote him that year. The editor of the correspondence notes that he also only wrote once in 1957 – in December, “still despondent and nostalgic for the old Wabansia magic, for their life and travels together.” Wabansia was the cruddy Chicago street he lived on when they were lovers. His building was eventually torn down.
Friday, October 21, 2005, 11:48 p.m.
Subject: moon
You had asked about the moon and I forgot to tell you. For a while it was spectacular, gawdy, and then for the last couple of days it disappeared below the horizon. Do you know why that happens? I was disappointed because I was waiting for it to come back full and naked and shocking the way it looked that night from your house. Like a white lady’s belly.
The first time Djeli kissed me, it was on the terrace of his apartment in Montmartre. After that embarrassing incident with Mariam in Bamako, I went home, of course, and a few months later found myself with reason to be in Paris. He invited me to his house, and this time I had a feeling something like this might happen. I’d brought him a couple of things from New York – that inappropriate scarf I’d knit, the iPod holder, a book. He looked at the little collection of offerings on the coffee table and smiled at me. He didn’t seem particularly put off by my disproportionate display of generosity. I think people give him gifts all the time. He said, “Let’s go out on the terrace. I’ll show you the view.”
We stepped out there, and there it was. Not the view, which was indeed very beautiful, but sort of predictably so – a picture postcard version of “the city of lights.” A little too clichéd to move you. The shocking, gorgeous, and obscene thing was the moon. It was full, white, enormous, and utterly exposed. We’d both seen it. We tried to make small talk but there was nothing to say. Djeli kissed my neck.
About ten minutes later we were fucking on his bed. I told him, “I was commenting to my friend Florence the other day that you were the most beautiful man in the world.” Djeli smiled.
I’ve been feeling guilty about implying Nelson Algren was a second-rate novelist. Over the last couple of days, I finally read The Man with the Golden Arm. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I considered watching the Otto Preminger film instead. It’s the story of a junkie gambler who inhabits the “underbelly” of Chicago. The movie stars Frank Sinatra. The paramour’s recollection of this film is primarily focused on Kim Novak’s breasts. I’ve never seen it. Well, I didn’t watch the film but I did read the novel, and I can’t decide whether I think it’s very good or not very good. It’s both. It’s hard-boiled and lyrical, naïve and incisive, hackneyed and utterly original. But it turns out it did win a prize: the National Book Award. People seem to forget this. In fact, it was the very first National Book Award. Algren also received some sort of medal from the American Academy and Institute. He apparently refused to go to the ceremony in New York at which he would be given the
medal, saying, facetiously, that he had to attend a meeting of a Ladies’ Garden Club back home in Chicago. He was famously pissed off about the Preminger film because he hardly made a dime off it. He was also, as I mentioned, famously pissed off at Simone de Beauvoir. He said to somebody, “She doesn’t baby her privacy, does she?” People who look back at the train wreck of the end of his career seem to concur that a) Algren got a raw deal and b) he ended up in a ditch he’d dug for himself. This is pretty much the story of Frankie Majcinek, the hero of The Man with the Golden Arm.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005, 10:18 a.m.
Subject: cozy
So you were in London when the bombs exploded? And when they killed that Brazilian electrician? I hope your trip went all right, despite these things.
I was very happy to read that you’re composing. I loved the idea of an album called “Peau.” More electric guitar is good. I don’t know a lot about it but I like that you’re playing more. My son plays keyboards in a rock band at school. He’s also a little out of it. The other kids in the band are all sons of aging rockers. I went with them to a Mötley Crüe concert. Can you imagine this? Me and two tattooed dads, bald with ponytails. And the boys in the band. It was really funny.
As I write, Sandro’s playing Thelonious Monk. Beautiful.
I saw Bill T. Jones’s dance company in Central Park the other day and now I can’t think about anything else. I didn’t love everything, but I found it very provocative. I think the big question he was asking was – what does it mean to dance solo, to dance a duet, or to dance in a corps de ballet in a time of an atrocious war?
The iPod cozy that looks like it’s made of moss is for you.
I wrote this message, of course, between the Coca-Cola incident and the first trip involving sex. Djeli was just beginning to formulate the way he wanted Peau to sound. He was exploring more and more the distorted, painful, expressive capacities of the electric guitar – ironically, as his lyrics were becoming ever more sparely lyrical and delicate. As I’ve said, I hadn’t really thought a lot about electric guitar, since that wasn’t my musical formation.
That field trip to the Mötley Crüe concert was fairly hilarious. I don’t know who felt more out of place – me, or Sandro. It was in Madison Square Garden. Somebody had snagged a skybox for our party. I tried to chitchat with the ponytailed dads. A guy brought in giant cups of soda for us, and potato chips, on the house. You know how rock concerts are. We were very far from the stage, but they have those huge video projections on the side. There were some women dancers with enormous, buoyant boobs making snarling faces at the audience. Tommy Lee rode onto the stage on a motorcycle and the crowd went wild. The biggest hit, which got the most enthusiastic reception, was their classic, “Girls, Girls, Girls.”
Perhaps you know the lyrics to that one. They start out extolling the virtues of leggy, red-lipped beauties from the West Coast and the Northeast; then they reminisce tenderly about a certain sexual escapade in Paris, France. They manage to rhyme “ménage à trois” with “breaking those Frenchies’ laws.”
Their rendition of this little chestnut was accompanied by much snarling and gyration from the dancers. The dads drank their sodas and ate chips. So did the kids. So did I. I was wondering what we were doing there but thinking it was an educational experience for Sandro and me.
If you do any research on Nelson Algren, one of the first factoids that inevitably pops up is that Lou Reed was inspired to write “Walk on the Wild Side” after reading Nelson Algren’s neglected novel of the same name. Mötley Crüe also recorded a song called “Wild Side,” but it’s unclear to me whether it was influenced by Algren, or even by Lou Reed. It does have one interesting line, though, which seems to have something to do with the art of correspondence: “Forward my mail to me in hell.”
Anyway, as regards our own correspondence, you can see even in this early message that I was already feeling very lucky to be on the receiving end of Djeli’s reflections on his creative process, and I wanted to share with him some of the thoughts I’d been having about life, art, and politics. I’m really not sure how much of an impression they made.
Of course, Peau has nothing to do with Mötley Crüe. It’s an almost excruciatingly beautiful album. Djeli’s voice is fragile, exquisite, Ultra-Sensitive, erotic. Djeli, if you’re reading this, please don’t be angry.
If the nightingales could sing like you, they’d sing much sweeter than they do.
In August of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir went on a trip through Scandinavia with Sartre. He was very popular in Denmark because of his philosophical debt to Kierkegaard, and the Dutch and the Swedes also seemed to have hard-ons for his grim, realistic view of things. Simone wrote Algren about this trip, and she affected a kind of bemusement about the way everyone was fawning over Sartre. Mostly, she described the terrain – particularly when they got to Sweden. She wrote, “My beloved Nelson, I write to you from your ancestral land.” She described the grey sea, the rocky soil, and the uncanny, strange quality of the light. She said it looked like a lunar landscape.
She wrote Algren, “Would you like to be on the moon with me, darling, or would you be afraid?”
Algren took a while to write back. She complained, “I do not like not to have letters from you.” She ended that one: “Feel how much I love you, please feel it just now, because just now I love you so much.”
A little over a month ago, Djeli wrote me saying that he was writing a song with an explicit critique of the catastrophic US foreign policy of the last eight years, but that he didn’t think it played into the facile anti-American rhetoric so prevalent in France. As you know, I’m more comfortable with that kind of rhetoric than Djeli is. Djeli said jokingly that even if I perceived this song as an attack on my nation, I could take it as sexually motivated, since I had on any number of occasions observed that he liked to launch into political tirades when he seemed to be sexually aroused. That was friendly of him. But the message wasn’t one of those where he directly provoked me for my simple-headed political correctness. I agreed with everything he said. In his e-mail, Djeli made the astute observation that in point of fact, he wasn’t anti-American: it was the Bush administration which was undermining the very American ideals that Djeli still found compelling. I wrote him:
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 5:43 p.m.
Subject: anti-american
You’re right, Bush is very anti-American. Did you ever read Emerson? Do you like him? When I read him, I feel American. It makes me cry. Montaigne makes me delirious, I prefer him, but I recognize myself in Emerson. The Self-Made Man.
Anyway, this diatribe of yours wasn’t one of those rants against me, or in friction with my politics. But that’s okay, I’ll give it a sexual value since you said I could. And being a Self-Made Man, I rub my American manhood up against yours, affectionately.
In the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, the critic George Bluestone made this surprisingly sentimental assertion: “If, as Algren makes abundantly clear, morality is not to be found in the law, the church, in criminal ethics, in social struggle, in any normative standards for success, then where is the moral authority? Only in love.”
I cried a little writing that last section. I wasn’t crying about Djeli. Djeli moves me, of course – his heartbreaking falsetto, his warm, soft kiss under the naked moon, the way he sometimes tries to provoke me sexually through his political bombast – but all these things make me smile. They don’t make me cry. The truth is, I was crying for Nelson Algren.
Thursday, January 17, 2008, 3:04 a.m.
Subject: – Gatwick Airport
I slept heavily, early, woke up early, walked on the beach. The sky was a little overcast. Packed in the afternoon. The flight to London was fine. But I have a huge layover now and that’s why I’m here killing time by writing you a long message with insignificant details on my BlackBerry.
I thought you were more near than far this time. Sometimes very near, the way you noticed eve
rything, like the way one of my eyes opens a little slower than the other. In those moments I felt very naked. But I liked it.
Uh oh. I just cried a little in Gatwick Airport. It’s okay, as soon as I get home I’ll see Sandro and he’ll say something hilarious, and Florence will come over in the evening and convince me to drink a martini, and I’ll feel happy. I have a piece to write. I have to read the new Roth.
I love our sex but sometimes I wonder if it’s okay for you. Sometimes I get very focused on myself. I do this because I think that it gives you pleasure when I feel pleasure. But afterwards I wonder. It’s very intense for me – that thing you do, when you’re so attentive, that little pause you make, I imagine you’re feeling what I’m feeling. It’s different, something that’s ours, I find it beautiful, but I don’t know how it is for you. I get dizzy just thinking about it.
The strategic error was saying I cried a little in Gatwick Airport.
As I mentioned before, the paramour responded to this e-mail with a banal message about mosquitoes, and very shortly thereafter we were playing fort/da. I later learned that the phrase that triggered the cold spell was when I said I’d “cried a little.” This made my lover feel boxed in. Actually, reading it over now, I can understand that.
The Correspondence Artist Page 14
