A STYLE MAGAZINE calls me to ask whether any contemporary stars have inherited Jackie’s glamour. I mention Jeanne Moreau. Silence on the other end of the line: Moreau is not a contemporary star. Tonight shall I go to the Quad and see her new movie about walking into the sea? (Now the film has fled to another locale.) I suggest to the magazine that I would love to interview Doris Day or Sophia Loren. Silence. I am confused about what’s contemporary and what’s outdated. I am confused about the spirit of the age.
*
In dreams I’ve been trying to teach remedial English. It’s not merely a class, it’s a century: the 20th. The dream recurs. Last night with a swoon of relief I realized that, though I missed meetings, the students have reading assignments to tide them over until my return: easy books about Bambi. Poor things patiently await Teacher’s reappearance. Is “Teacher” a fiction? A friend told me that a teacher can create effects of power by suddenly using difficult language in a seminar, or, better yet, by not showing up. The students will interpret Teacher’s absence as a terrifying judgmental presence.
*
Out of the blue my sixth-grade teacher writes me a letter. Now she is a drug-rehabilitation counselor. Does she recall my inability to pay attention?
*
I lunch with a favorite mentor, and we discuss whether it’s possible to lecture objectively about hysteria: can you talk about a subject without enacting it? We converse about coughing and MTV, and we agree, provisionally, that hysteria is a precondition for creativity. I recommend Hysteria (1964).
*
Vintage stars are returning to Gotham’s stages: Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, Maria Callas (channeled by Zoe Caldwell). Ladies of my anterior life, revived! Now Debra Monk recirculates “The Ladies Who Lunch”—Elaine Stritch’s signature song from Company. Everybody rise! And Oscar Wilde’s Salome is “back” at BAM!
*
At the buffet table, a scholar interested in automatic writing uses the words “iconophilia” and “iconophobia.” Great words! I jot them down. Our age has both syndromes simultaneously: it is enamored of representation but afraid of querying it. Mr. Automatic speculates that Jews have iconophobia, and cites Walter Benjamin, but this seems a case of iconophilia, so we drop the subject.
*
The day of the O.J. verdict, an expert appears on a news show to analyze the defendant’s body language. Did his gestures broadcast guilt or innocence? I note the presumption that we, as a nation, can’t evaluate nuance; do we need an expert to interpret human gesture? Or, as a teacher once told me, “The reader is not a potato.”
*
At a conference about Modernism, Ian Hacking, from the University of Toronto, uses the phrase “the wound of the day” to describe the fin-de-siècle French phenomenon of les automatismes ambulatoires, or vagabondage: men who, overcome by states of fugue and amnesia, wandered away from family and job. What an attractive disorder! In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve had it. So did the Beats and Paul Bowles: the compulsion to drift off from identity.
*
I wander down 22nd Street on a hot, late-September day (global warming) and find Jimmy De Sana’s photos at Pat Hearn Gallery. In one, a nude man buries his head in a toilet, suds pouring out of the bowl. Good! In another: a high-heeled shoe is crammed inside a pantyhosed crotch. Satisfaction! Jimmy De Sana died in 1990, and these photos document what one calls, knowingly, “another era.” I am interested in our era only to the extent that it is also not ours, not now, not here: an era of identity’s displacement.
*
Eighth Avenue: in the crosswalk, a young man and I talk about poetics. His neck looks like food.
*
From obituaries I glean the spirit of the age. Ida Lupino died this year. She was only 77. I should have written her a letter. “Her leisure pursuits included skin-diving, writing short stories and children's books and composing music. One work, ‘Aladdin Suite,’ was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.” If I can locate her vehicle Ladies in Retirement, the story of a “stolid housekeeper who kills her overbearing employer so she may use the house as a sanctuary for her two insane sisters,” then I can deduce whether the sisters are really insane, and I can define “sanctuary.”
*
Eva Gabor died this year. From her obituary, this snippet of an interview: “Because of my allergies I like to buy very cheap makeup with no perfume. I buy things on sale. The prices today are shocking.” She ran a multimillion-dollar wig company. To discern what’s “now,” I follow wigs. Eva Gabor’s sister Zsa Zsa starred in Queen of Outer Space (1958), which reshuffles a half-century’s card deck of catastrophes and insurrections: Hiroshima, lesbian utopias, Orientalism, Eastern European nationalisms and revolutions, the beautiful fictitiousness of heterosexuality. . . .
Red Gucci bags. Red Patrick Cox wanna-bes. Some men’s shiny shoes now recall 1959 women’s pocketbooks. Unzipped proves that fashion ideas come from “fags” watching revivals and paying acute attention to fugue and fatigue. I want to file “fag” in a clean manila envelope named “fugue,” and to store “men’s shoes” in a conceptual box called les automatismes ambulatoires.
*
Steven Watson, at a symposium on Florine Stettheimer at the Whitney Museum, New York, plays a tape of old Virgil Thomson saying “Gertrude loved nuns,” and asserting that high camp is the only technique that can represent religious experience. How weirdly modern Virgil Thomson sounds, and how happy we are to have him back. After the symposium I shake the hand of Joseph Solomon, who once held the shoe box containing Florine’s ashes. I muse on his virile handshake, a dream of historical continuity.
*
In a conversation I use the word “surreal” twice, and an art historian says I am overusing the word, so, a little drunk, I defend my penchant for “surreal.” I say, “In search of the zeitgeist, I’m reading Surrealist manifestos! I’m committed to fugue states, trances, derangement!” Later, I call the body a temple, not to be profaned, and a neuropsychologist tells me that brains require interaction in order to evolve. I ask him whether my brain is dying or whether it is generating new files.
*
A sociologist tells me that the notion of the zeitgeist is a “crock of shit.” Then we talk about the “teacher-student” fornication in To Die For and I offer him a splash of CK One unisex cologne.
*
At the Stettheimer symposium, panelists talk about skin tones. Was she a political artist? Can a merely “decorative” artist redefine what is considered political? An artist removed from the spirit of her age but also profoundly at its helm, she participated in a “public” political discourse while seeming merely to be painting pretty, “private” salon art. If her work is exhibited in full only now, in 1995, can her paintings address today’s circumstances, or must we understand her art only within the context of her “own” time?
A friend has compiled an anthology of contemporary “world poetry.” On the train, he shows me the table of contents. I am afraid I will get my donut glaze on it, but magically the manuscript escapes ruin. I’m unfamiliar with most of the writers he’s included. My ignorance appalls, hyperstimulates: new poets to discover, many of them alive, composing the age. In today’s mail, PEN’s newsletter arrives. It suggests that members send holiday greetings to incarcerated writers—Pramoedya Ananta Toer, for example, under town arrest in Utan Kayu, Jakarta.
*
Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, has just been published by the University of California Press, and much as I distrust anthologies I compulsively page through this one, which advocates futurisms galore, and which includes artifacts that don’t usually travel under the name “poem.” In an entrancing excerpt from Mallarmé’s Le Livre (he died in 1898, but I have yet to take his measure), the poet has crossed words out: lines through “end,” “conscience,” “And sorrows,” “street,” “childhood,” “double,” “their,” “crowd,” “crime,” “sewer.” The editors quote Maurice Blanchot on Mallarmé: “At times his work solidifies into an immobile white virtuality, at times—and this is what matters most—it becomes animated by an extreme temporal discontinuity, given over to changes in time and to accelerations and decelerations, to fragmentary stoppages, the sign of a wholly new essence of mobility in which another [sense of] time seems to be announcing itself, as foreign to eternal permanence as to quotidian duration: [in Mallarmé’s words,] ‘here moving ahead, there remembering, in the future, in the past, under a false appearance of the present.’” The editors also mention Paul Valéry: “For the rest of his life his main labor consisted in rising daily at five A.M. to write down his thoughts & meditations in his Carnets, the notebooks that eventually numbered two hundred fifty. The study of consciousness as such was to be the fulcrum of his notebook writing, & there, however unable or unwilling he was to integrate them into his poetics, he could not escape the essentially fragmentary possibilities of his century. . . .” To do: read Valéry’s Carnets.
*
Emily Dickinson understood the fragmentary possibilities of her century. In a letter published in an Amherst College newspaper, The Indicator, on February 7, 1850, she suggests revolutionary displacements: “we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place.” Also: “That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite.” But what if metaphors do bite? Fragments of an agoraphobe’s poetry touch—maul—the outside world.
*
Poetry makes nothing happen, yet Adrienne Rich has just published a new volume, Dark Fields of the Republic, from which I quote these rhetorically compelling lines: “But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged/into our personal weather/They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove/along the shore, through the rags of fog/where we stood, saying I.” (I love “rags of fog”: musical two gs, two fs.) Rich falsely polarizes “birds of history” and “personal weather.” Birds and weather are figures of speech. To diagnose a national malaise is to employ metaphors.
*
This year, Johns Hopkins University Press has republished Gertrude Stein’s The Geographical History of America, originally published by Random House in 1936. Republic-ation. Revivals and republications trumpet the indescribable reveille of this instant. From The Geographical History: “How many animals birds and wild flowers are there in the United States and is it splendid of it to have any.” From her private vantage, Stein unsentimentally fingered public textures, historical birds; her every sentence constitutes a republication.
*
A recitation that Stein might have enjoyed, John Keene’s Annotations, appears this year from New Directions. Its first sentence: “Such as it began in the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, on Fathers’ Day, you not some babbling prophet but another Negro child, whose parents’ random choices of signs would disorient you for years.” More and more I choose a voice that disorients. Keene’s last sentence: “And so, patient reader, these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations.” On the book’s cover, an untitled painting by Glenn Ligon, from which I can make out only a few words: “BUT THIS,” “DISGUISE,” “EXPECTED,” “MYSELF,” “SEE MYSELF.” The autobiographical project: to find, through close attention to the texture of the speaking, self-revealing voice, what body (nation, subjectivity, history) is being obliquely annotated.
*
Also from Annotations: “Missouri, being an amalgam of nearly every American religion, presents the poet with a particularly useful analogue for an articulation of the ‘American,’ though close inspection shows a sum less metaphorically potent than its metonymically dissoluble parts. Show me.” I want to write more about the beauties of “Show me” but it is time to go to a lecture.
*
On the way to the lecture, my friend and I meet Renaud Camus, author of Tricks (1979), due for reissue next month by High Risk Books. My friend, once cutely sedate, now has five piercings. I go to his hotel and the hormonally imbalanced woman who used to work at the dry cleaners is now running the reception desk. She wears heavy pancake makeup, compensatory. She winks at me. She knows I recognize her from the dry cleaners. Then Leo Bersani, at his lecture, proposes that we redo the “relational” by paying attention not only to micropolitics but to desire’s structure. We can destroy “regimes of the normal” by stepping outside psychological law (in the manner of Caravaggio or Genet). Bersani pronounces “homosexual” the way Julie Andrews did in the original Victor/Victoria: Homo Seeks Ewe Ull. Perhaps this pronunciation demonstrates a stance toward sibilance.
*
Genitalia are “in”? Molly Peacock’s new book of poems, Original Love, published by Norton in 1995, uses taut fixed lengths of verse to comment on the weirdness of genitals, especially one’s own; “When I open my legs to let you seek,/seek inside me, seeking more, I think/‘What are you looking for?’ and feel it will/be hid from me.” Or: “labia like chicken wattles/below a hooded clitoris.” This is not only a description of personal weather.
*
Movies recirculate. Without their recirculation, the imagination would lose ghost limbs to gangrene. Queen of Outer Space, in CinemaScope and starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, reappears at a nearby theater, and then, miraculously, Joan Crawford’s last film, Trog (1970), rises to sight—so ignored, at its origin and its return, that it has liberty to sing of the future. If I were to begin to explain the significance of Trog, I’d keep you here all night: wigs, microphones, caves, voice-box transplants, boy nudity, unloved daughters, slimy drunk men who disrupt Joan’s quest for scientific progress. In the last moment of the film and the last frames of her career, she strides offscreen, refusing to comment on the slaughter of Trog (protege, monster, double)—emblem of the pathologized has-been’s oracular voice. Outdated images still detonate. Trog (diminutive for troglodyte, cave-dweller, has-been, representative of an earlier, superseded moment or mode) still demands reading, still demands that—in its presence—we not be potatoes but that we listen to instructions.
*
A year before Trog’s first release, Marilyn Minter took photographs of her mother, a series finally exhibited this year under the title “Coral Ridge Towers”—a reappearance oddly rhyming with the Whitney’s recent exhumation of Florine Stettheimer’s lost art. Looking at Minter’s mother, I succumb to iconophilia: this lost woman, smoking, mirror-obsessed, seems glamorously agoraphobic, and I revel in her avoidance of crowds. Fear of the marketplace can engender the backward, smashed glamour of the shut-in. Bury Trog for 20 years, or “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” and then the ignored, abject object will come slouching toward you, its mouth full of fragmentary possibilities.
*
The circuit of one’s own preoccupations leads to agoraphobia (I don’t want to leave my apartment, I want to stay here in bed and smoke and put on makeup and stare at the mirror and the dust bunnies) or wanderlust (I want to travel outside the “Coral Ridge Tower” of my personality in order to rediscover lost coordinates). When I lie alone in bed, am I Trog? Am I a dark bird of history when I cruise the streets, looking for a good movie, or a metaphor?
*
Emily Dickinson, in 1842, is away at school. Soon she will commit forever to her father’s house. She writes, in a letter: “this Afternoon is Wednesday and so of course there was Speaking and Composition—there was one young man who read a Composition the Subject was think twice before you speak. . . . ” And from a later letter (1850): “I don’t think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young woman’s journal—the country’s still just now, and the severities alluded to will have a salutary influence in waking the people up.” The country is motionless. Meanwhile I contemplate the underground rapport between the words “Subject,” “twice,” and “speak.” The Subject speaks twice. No one hears the Subject the first time, so the Subject speaks again. The Subject doesn’t exist until the second coming.
*
To do:
1. Wake the people up.
2. Think twice before I speak.
3. Write down all the recent deaths and scrutinize them—including the death of Larry, who lent me a bootleg Ida Lupino video, and rode a taxi once with Anita O’Day (she reappeared this year at the Rainbow and Stars).
4. Remember to show up for the class called The 20th Century and assign a book other than Bambi.
5. Ransack heaven and earth to find Ladies in Retirement.
6. Try to meet Marilyn Minter to ask if her mother was agoraphobic.
7. Piece together the rest of the words in Glenn Ligon’s Untitled.
8. Examine Florine Stettheimer’s politics.
9. Discover Trog’s relevance to the future.
10. See Master Class, Victor/Victoria, and Company even if I end up hating all three.
11. Flip a coin to divine whether, as Penthouse suggests, the penis can save Broadway. (It can’t.)
12. Stop writing sonnets.
13. Find Valéry’s Carnets.
14. Figure out whether metaphors bite.
