Duck Beater

Only Resolutions

What I wanted to do was sulk in bed, but was in fact too tired to do so—too tired to index the shapeliness and heft of my woes. They were more like agitations. The tip of the iceberg account might look like “punctuality” is a humungous emotional trigger for me, and bobs up at the slightest change of plans, thus my seeming-rabidness in the fifteen minutes before a movie begins. I hate being late to theaters, I hate missing trailers, I don’t want to be subject to an incomplete experience. This is only an example from last week: I rushed my housemate to see Dark Shadows—a film that, in the end, I felt like walking out of two-thirds deep, mostly because I was bored. To be fair, she was also very bored. Why should we hold our attention spans hostage like that? We had skipped frozen yogurt in our haste, and the guy selling us pretzels at the theater was in his forties, it was his first day on the job, he was anxious to say so, he smiled tremulously. We gathered under a pall. Later my housemate corroborated this, experiencing it as a temperature drop. We wondered if in our mid-life we would have to take a vending gig at the local multiplex. I don’t have a thesis. She doesn’t have a dissertation. The months are against us. He gave us the thumbs up as we staggered away from his impeccably depressing service. The sea-hidden berth account might look like I need presence and regularity in portions dictated only by me, to sustain romance or friendship. These buried themes are not mysterious to anyone who has been in a long-distance relationship, where time is of the essence in a boiling way, or a freezing way, to continue the metaphor.

I flickered in and out of ambient disappointment while dozing through upbeat dreams. One such had me taking down numbers and times on an obstacle course. My steno pad was in serious danger of having mud and grass flung on its pages, and, like officiates from my high school days on the cross country team, I clutched a clipboard to my chest with one hand and held the stop-watch at my waist in the other. I was an involved spectator of the sport in a non-integral way, still I was integrated for statistical purposes. Purpose, in the dream, gave me a great deal of puffed-up ego. The athletes were lean but nondescript, and I think the dream realized them in a breathy, blurry way, as though recycled from a sports drink commercial. The sun beat down on my visor, the air was bright and muggy, my legs felt wrapped in warm blankets. This was so. I was sweating in bed when my brother texted me to come pick him up. He was at a small get-together for groomsmen. The wedding is this afternoon.

They were very drunk when I arrived. Arriving was a mini-adventure. Under Todd’s direction, I had ambled through an intersection and proceeded down a dead-end country road, onto gravel. This was going on two in the morning. I slept many nights on my parents’ bedroom floor as a boy, having read too many stories about unclassifiable beasts with talons. So fog was acting on my superstitions, especially in the way it submerged animals in the glens I was then trekking. There was the usual-unusual streaky carrion—animals painting the bleached macadam skull-wise with their gray-red guts—but also the menagerie of skittish possums, over-confident raccoons, and the flank of a deer here, just passing through the mists and behind a tree. The number of shredded pelts on most Indiana backroads should be enough to convince anyone of a live and active Mothman contingency, or some other blood-sucker from cryptozoology. I kept one eye on my rear-view mirror lest a visitor grapple onto my trunk. My boyfriend was still texting me little apologies or inducements that were impossible to read while driving, but were nonetheless sending me into paroxysms of self-righteousness. Todd called as I was about to call him, to give me updated directions. Of course I was lashing against a paranormal attack when I went into the barking fuckety-fucks which is what always happens when I feel minimal geographical misfortune. Getting to Bath from my house involves crossing into Franklin County, a place with too many drownings not to be accursed. I didn’t want to run into the lake. I didn’t want to hit a coyote. His phone was on an MP3 dock and broadcast across the yard and among the revelers, “I don’t want to be in this fucking shit pit of switchbacks, get me the fuck on black top. Fucking Christ, are the fucking taxpayers holding out for cross-wise street names, why are the fucking intersections fucking unmarked? Is this the fucking third world?” It was farmland and ravines. I was on Hetrick Road. Taking an immediate left would set me west again, and once I had the water tower in view I could right myself on Bath Road and follow it north into the town.

The last time I was on any of those roads was eight years ago when I skipped Senior Prom. More or less the same group of guys stood in the driveway (leaner, still Busch-drinking), excepting Kevin, who was my year, and did attend prom that night, and with a lunatic. My enduring love for Kevin somewhat shades my perception of that time. And also his girlfriend, his ex-, rather. Things went south when she started forging letters from his guy friends. She compressed her dreamy loops into what she desperately believed were a man’s angular scrawls. She thought Kevin was spending too much time with his guy friends. If she could convince him that they were in fact in league against him, somehow, she might win a little more of his time. This was before Facebook and also text-messaging, technologies that have since made these schemes doubly ludicrous. Maybe this is an example of a water-shed moment: the last enfeebled, quasi-adult, hand-written tragedy of self-deception. While her deviousness was pathetic it wasn’t completely incomprehensible. Kevin made girls sick with lust. He was a paragon. Something about his gait, his weight, the blocky-ness of his trunk, his jawline and prissy full lips; I can’t locate it anymore: why I’m listing anatomy. This, despite just-average performance at football. He was also catcher for varsity baseball and did so cup-less, which his admirers found nerve-wracking. The lot of us pining for him were genuinely concerned about his genitals. I worried that a fast-pitch would bounce off his shin-guard and deform him in the way of Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises. He still has great skin, bronzed, with soft dark moles on his neck. His eyes have a blue depth that really belies the number of women he’s inured to fart jokes, farts generally, wet ones. Kevin stood on the driveway’s edge when I passed through the night, the telamon come off his temple. He waved solemnly.  

And Now I, an Unlikely Candidate, Shall Defend the Trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby

towlehouse:

Well, you guys, it’s finally here.  The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s new version of The Great Gatsby.   I have been waiting for this thing to drop since rumors of the film first circulated way back in 2010.  You see, The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel and has been for a decade.  I absolutely loathe the 1974 Robert Redford film version, and I dislike the 2000 made-for-TV version (starring Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway!).  Both films are stodgy and boring, with none of the easy grace of Fitzgerald’s prose.  So I for one am happy to see a new vision of the story come to the big screen.  

I might be the only one, though.  There’s a lot of snickering online about the trailer and its grandiosity (admittedly, the trailer does come a little too close to Moulin Rouge for my taste), and everyone is acting like it’s a damn shame to have a Kayne West/Jay-Z song open the video.  Well, my friends, I am here to defend it in all its over-the-top, borderline-silly pomp.  The Great Gatsby may be well-respected, but I find that in the real world, a lot of people don’t care for it.  It’s easy to see why.  Its symbolism isn’t always subtle, the story is theatrical at best and ridiculous at worst, and the characters are unlikeable (although I would be the first to defend half of them).  In order to downplay all these things, adaptations of the book have tried too hard to make it super-serious.  They let the drama weigh it down.

The Great Gatsby is a very serious book, don’t get me wrong.  But people often give it too much credit on its dramatic front and forget just how operatic it is at heart.  It’s a big story, full of morally-sticky characters, played out at the edge of America’s most important city, New York.  It’s a book that tackles capital-A America.  The thing I love most about The Great Gatsby is that it’s essentially allegory writ large, told with some of the cleanest and lightest prose in all of English.  Here’s the outsider newbie coming to the New Land (literally).  See him meet larger-than-life figures.  Watch him start to lose his soul.  Stay for the spectacular death.  Close with a sweeping monologue.  This is a big book packed into less than two hundred pages.

When Baz Luhrmann announced he was tackling Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, I was one of the only people who seemed delighted by the news.  Here’s someone who does everything on a too-big scale, and doesn’t a book that is essentially the definitive American opera deserve to be told on a big scale?  I have no illusions that I’m going to love this movie; I know I probably won’t even like it (partly because Tobey Maguire, the most boring actor on the planet, is playing my favorite Fitzgerald character, Nick Carraway).  But I admire the fact that someone is taking this on, making an Important Book into a spectacle. 

I believe that the books we love are loved for incredibly personal reasons.  Hundreds and thousands and millions of people may have the same favorite book you do, but I am willing to bet money that each persons’ reasons are completely different.  The Great Gatsby is so omnipresent in American literature that it may never get to be viewed on its own merit, but for those of us who do love it, we love it for what we find in it on our own.  I love The Great Gatsby because it gets at a particularly middle-class, middle-west identity crisis that I share: that we long to leave our familiar place behind only to find out we don’t belong anywhere else.  Nick Carraway’s return to the Midwest at the end of Gatsby breaks my heart.  He never should have left in the first place.  Neither should have Daisy or James Gatz.  It’s a kind of fear that only someone like Fitzgerald  - himself a Midwesterner who got the hell out and then never quite found his place in the world – understood.  And I understand it as well.  Not everyone who loves the book feels this way, though.  That’s what makes “big” stories like this great; everyone gets their own distinct thing out of it. 

So I applaud the use of “No Church in the Wild.”  I applaud the use of big lights and dancers and overdone accents (I’m looking at you, Carey Mulligan).  There’s no reason to like this movie.  There’s no reason to like the book.  There’s no reason to love any verison of The Great Gatsby at all.  But for those of us who do love it, we love it in our own weird ways.  And this is just one of those weird ways. 

PREACH.

Also, I could rlly go for a 2nd Moulin Rouge!. Like, “Moulin Putrid…” or something with a risen-Satin and an ellipsis? Beth, remember what Trilling said of Fitzgerald—”[he] was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal self.” AKA Christian, the Ewan McGregor-character who writes the libretto for the comic-opera starring whores. 

I’m quite taken, anyway, with the trailer.

Also, “I wish I’d done everything on Earth with you.” Isn’t that the dearest?

Did anyone else…

subscribe to The New Inquiry as a good-faith gesture towards tending the internet’s ecology of intellectual writers/intellectual manqué, and now can’t be bothered to scroll through the PDFs they send? They are beautiful PDFs. But I haven’t read through any of them.

If I printed them out I wouldn’t be so bound to read them only at my workstation (dining room table). I could read them in the park. Or on the train (were I to take a train somewhere). But is that the point?

Licking the Knife

An undergrad affair that, until I arrived, and because of the read on a Facebook events algorithm, I had believed was primarily stocked with my pleasant young gay friends. Think of the way some ponds in zoological gardens are stocked with brilliant spotted koi. I want to spread bread crumbs over brocaded carp, is what I thought. I drank a beer early in the evening, and ate Jarlsberg cheese on focaccia, and then dozed while reading My Paris. I was in my boxer shorts and ready for bed when one of the birthday boys texted me to please come over, if only for the last thirty minutes of the party, and I thought, This is like destiny calling. I will sow nourishment upon the sucking fish. I count myself as one of the fish. 

The party had a split-theme to do with Nicki Minaj and Paris. I wore silvery black tennis shoes, skinny jeans, and a gray and blue striped t-shirt. I was in need of a baguette to make the synthesis complete.

Of course I knew very few people at the party. One very drunk young lady called me Al Roker over and over, to her friends, and brought strangers to my corner of a too-brightly lit, over-crowded kitchen. She announced that she had made a new friend: Al Roker. She touched my chest with her palm and even grazed my hip with a cold finger, having wagged it under my shirt. She took great breaths to apologize for how sloppy she was before imploding in fits of giggles and continuing with the Al Roker shenanigans. I was in agony, not only because this attention was stupid and activating my flight-or-fight response (the blush on my cheeks had enough sting to make my eyes water), but also because I have a real disgust (irrational) for the diminishing weather-man. In fact, most minor-celebrities who undergo gastric bypass surgery look sunken or decrepit to me, as if the whole of their glow depended on robust lipids whose new uselessness mucks with the conversion of electricity in their bodies. In no way did I want to be perceived as sunk or old, even if basically that’s how I feel.

This young lady was relentless. She was fleshy and wide, and wore pancake make-up in a subtle way. She was buxom or un-noteworthy, depending on the berth of your category for “normal-pretty.” Acne scarring patterned her foundation from below. It looked as though she had fallen asleep with her cheek pressed against a screen. I was mesmerized by the regularity of the scarring, as if under the soft creme appliqué she was made of waffle cone. The longer she amused herself by calling me Al Roker, the more intensely I scrutinized her acne scars. She seemed to be at the zenith of her intake for the night; a rambling melange of her girlfriends passed between us to apologize on her behalf, saying, “She never ever drinks,” or, “This is why we never take her outside.” 

This is the second strong interaction I’ve had with a Saint Mary’s girl. At Notre Dame they’re essentially second-class citizens with access to our libraries, course offerings, rec facilities, etc. Excepting the over-representation of lesbians at an all-girls Catholic school, it’s widely assumed they bother to cross the pond at all to find a husband. Or whatever. The Smick Chick inferiority complex is a real thing (like my Ivy League inferiority complex is a real thing), and it’s cruel, too. The other encounter I had was back in October, when a girl asked if she could DJ our house party even though Tori and I had already spent about two hours coming up with a “ghetto fabulous” dance mix. “It’s just that this is sort of my thing, I DJ parties.” We let her control the music. I can’t say if it was any better for the ambience or not because I got drunk and danced a lot practically all by myself. I mean, at a certain point that night I would have dropped it to Brad Paisley were he to come up in the shuffle.

During an interval my host, the birthday boy, had poured me a glass of punch and asked me to drink up. I sensed machinery at work—submerged, but whirring, and later on my intuition proved correct. The punch was a combination of vodka and beer that not unpleasantly reeked of lemon. When no one was looking I dumped it in the sink and poured myself a glass of water. I wanted to be awake for when the machine revealed itself and its power. I guzzled down the water and poured another for a social prop. The bright red Solo cup really accented my neutral palette. It also gave me something other than my soul to look deep inside of and grieve over.

Well, it was weird. House parties that are too brightly lit have all the foment of purgatory. Guests circle through rooms until they’re flushed onto lawns. I’d rather be in streetlight than under a rental house’s fluorescents. There’s no exchange in day-lit rooms; all the stains are on display; the mismatched patterns and threadbare fabrics of generationally handed-off furniture and rugs and curios, even the pre-adult smells of student housing take on new muscularity, sex, ravioli, yucca leaves, a carpet so dusty its practically sandy. Nothing signaled a Nicki Minaj or Parisian theme—was there even any music?—and I was right not to pursue a baguette. A few of my friends and acquaintances were hiding behind the TV in the living room—a place I had dashed through before to avoid a small crush of people whom know me via Facebook but otherwise? I might be of interest to others because I spend reserves of energy gracefully avoiding everyone. (This checks out because detachment is like cat-nip to some boys.) I might also be of interest because I have a reputation for being an easy lay. (This checks out until the actually laying, when one discovers how minuscule my penis is—it might as well be a gash down there and so of course engenders profound difficulties.) I’m kidding about the easy lay and the attached parentheses. But I do wonder if, because Notre Dame is an over-determined hot-house of gay guys reacting against a culture of indoctrinated self-hate, interactions always carry an illicit and therefor erotic charge. It’s very comedy-of-manners, nattering about pop art, and then you’ve turned a corner and it’s all very Our Lady of the Flowers. This can’t be helped, I suppose. I guess I do flirt. 

Also earlier in the afternoon an informer—in fact the birthday boy—had related to me a fairly devastating summation of some drama from last semester, of which I was both completely a part in, and am sorry-ish for, but had, until then, perceived as innocuous or recovered. Which is why I was avoiding the party (nap) until I had express consent to attend (text message). I wanted to feel necessary but not complicit, and maybe forgiven, too. It was weird that I knew so few people there. I timed my venture. I was out of my car, in the party, and back in my car in no less than thirty minutes. Unfortunately I had grossly underestimated the workings of the buried machinery which, in the last three minutes of my attendance, steeled itself and arose, and crawled on great earth-shaking legs out of its hiding place, revealed hugely, with maw and claws and wet shining eyes. 

The birthday boy followed me out to my car, got in it, and refused to leave for the next two hours. I don’t think it was crucial that I was present for the ensuing meltdown—most of it was projection and misinterpretation—but because of my discomfort, and also the event’s duration, I did supply myself with fries and a diet soda while the most crippling of the confessions and counter-confessions were lobbed at me. I think it’s important to be driving while someone tells you, “You didn’t drink tonight because you didn’t want to put yourself in a position where you ended up sleeping with me,” because at a very basic level you are outpacing—spatially—these ludicrous pronouncements. Literally driving past them. Maybe only I feel this way. I, anyway, have the sensation of being somewhat more shielded from embarrassing misunderstandings when tootling around in my car. It was not despicable what transpired—if anything it was heartening, and also interesting. But in the denouement I had a flash of writerly ecstasy—fiction shark jumping out of its deep blue depths to sparkle in the cold skies above, hungry for experience—when I realized that this young man was consummating my otherwise still-born fantasy of being put in the position of receiving a declaration of strong attachment. (This is why I read Austen in the summertime, to sustain my gratitude for these moments.) But actually sitting through one (or several), in real time, blows, and demoralizes all involved parties.