several circles full
Sep. 23rd, 2004 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmI feel like I have an inordinate amount of writing to catch up on -- things that needs to be written for submission deadlines, things I keep meaning to post, and so forth. A million things happened today that I want to talk about, although I don't truly feel as if I've the energy for it. This turned out really long and it's still like maybe a third of the things I'm thinking about and want to write about, and that's just here in the journal.
The casting for the Coke thing went well, but you know whatever, you get your number you hand your stuff in they take a polaroid, you wonder if it matters as they try to get just the right angle for a shot of you, and life goes on.
The audition was, amazingly, in the loft style office building over a club I used to go to. I hadn't been on far west 14th street in ages, and while I knew it had changed, as much from conversations with others as from the occassional glance at magazines and all that -- dear god... it was like Soho circa 1986 -- huge cavernous clothing shops with no one in them, and tweed is even fashionable again. It was bizarre, and made me both melacholy and sort of strangely happy. It was a very full circle day, in every possible way. I was walking around singing Minstrel Boy because I'd been listening to the Black Hawk Down soundtrac again (which is working on the fact that I need to sit down and write on about six different projects, because that soundtrack is really tapping into the current spirit of several of things I keep stalling on).
Anyway.
So then I watched Maurice. Which of course I've seen, but not really in I suppose fifteen years. I blame all sorts of things on that film. Like my oxblood wingtips. Like my participation in the Roots of Western Tradition Living and Learning program at my university (a disaster of immoderate proporitons). There was a certain sort of education I wanted, a natural extension of the world Hewitt hinted at, and maybe, looking back on it, was the first impossible thing I pursued with my particularly patented form of irrationality. But in the end, while it wasn't anything like I'd hoped, I got what I wanted in a way. I mean, I did at least write a paper on Alexander the Great with cites from scholarly texts written in both Classical Greek and Latin in the mid-1800s. You know, all of that is just really starting to finally be funny. At any rate, it's a terribly formative movie for me (albeit mostly in the ridiculous pomposity of their friend who winds up getting sent to prison, but really, I always wanted to be just that sort of institigator in college, and I suppose anyone who has ever heard me drawl viciously about anyone knows that it's something I've never really stopped playing at). Anyway, the movie is lovely of course, but strange from so many vantage points -- my life, politics -- it all seems a little extraordinary now.
Which, somehow, brings us to the subject of Anne Rice. As I think half the free world knows by now she got into it with her (former)fans on the Amazon reviews. And not only did she get into it, she did so in a long ranty sort of way without paragraph breaks, solid logic or a command of punctuation and without an understanding that every preference a person has really doesn't have anything to do with her at all. I feel like I keep coming back to the Anne Rice thing here, mainly because I feel like I always preface it with a lot of disclaimers and then fail to make my point artfully, but I want to try again:
I am self-absorbed, vain and narcissistic in very particular ways. I view most things through the lens of its relevance to me, not just because it is human nature (and everyone who claims not to do it, does it just as much, they're just less artful, more shameful, or at least have more external distractions in their life than a relatively solitary creature such as myself). I know this, and I know that it frequently works against me, even as it is frequently a tool both to the realization of my ambitions and at the very least my own personal amusement. It's my nature, and it is what it is.
When I read The Vampire Lestat, I considered for the first time the possiblity that I wasn't a bad person just because I wasn't to other people's tastes, or was emotional, or cared for my solitude, or wanted more than I thought was reasonable. I became fond of the idea of Anne Rice the person -- we share a birthday and her birth name is actually Howard. I always liked that, and fancied what it would have been like had I been given a boy's name to keep secret, and her books were long a comfort to me even after their plots ceased to interest me, and the order and possiblity of her created world diminished so sharply in my eyes. When I saw Michael in San Francisco it was a terrible time, and I curled up in his borrowed bed reading that book again and wearing my ankh as he slept on the couch. We drank Bailey's and fought over that too, because it was there to fight over.
But when I was small, and I didn't know what it was like to have anyone other than my mother hold my hand, I used to imagine what it would feel like to have Lestat hold my hand, or Armand -- how his hands would be as small as my own, and even now I can still cycle through the differences of those imagined memories, pitch perfect and exact, weight and temperature of skin, preferences in the pressure of fingers. It's maybe one reason I started writing, not just to be less lonely, but because I could write anyone once I knew how I'd have to angle my head to look them in the eyes, or knew the size of their hands compared with my own.
I don't know what artists, or even those lesser creatures (*snerk*) celebrities, owe anyone. Probably nothing, all our myriad expectations aside. I met Anne Rice a few times at signings, and over the years I've known a myriad of people who both were her friends, and claimed to be her friends. I know that somewhere I once read that she writes notes for her projects on her walls, and writing on things not paper always became emblematic to me of a certain sort of madness I had no choice but to respect even as I was glad it was not me. She'd given herself over to something or other, her Lestat, her dead daughter... who knows. And I'm the sort of Romantic asshat that finds charm in these things, and respects them, not because there's anything fun about being fucked up, but if you're going to run with it... you do something with it, and that's hard. And I admire it. I have to.
But this whole thing on Amazon, well it makes me sad. I've not finished an Anne Rice book in years and years and years, and I don't mind. It doesn't matter if they're terrible, or maybe if I've just changed a lot. I still know how I've always seen certain characters smile, how the name Julien comforted me just for the sound of its syllables, and how I trembled when I first read The Vampire Lestat, knowing that my friends and I could sit around and talk about whether we'd choose the eternal life thing or not had the choice come to us as it did him, and that most of them wouldn't, and that maybe I was a little different, a little more daring than the coward I'd always been told I was, because I knew from the first, I'd say yes.
So it makes me sad. To see responses, not that are so ill-conceived (though they are and my god, if I don't know about typed apoplectic rage and self-absorption, who does?), but that effectively negate the very power of the things she's attempting to defend... it's so hard to explain, but it's like, her ideas, even if she's terrible at telling us about them -- even if she's rude and arrogant and odd -- they're strong forceful things, or else so many people wouldn't be writing entries like mine. They don't need her defense, and I wish she would listen to her strategic creatures. And I wish, both because I wish my nature was different and because I wish Anne Rice hadn't said all that stupid crap on Amazon, that it didn't make me sad. It's horrible, feeling embarassed for someone that helped me not to feel embarassed about myself. Even if she's a stranger. Even if it's all make believe.
The casting for the Coke thing went well, but you know whatever, you get your number you hand your stuff in they take a polaroid, you wonder if it matters as they try to get just the right angle for a shot of you, and life goes on.
The audition was, amazingly, in the loft style office building over a club I used to go to. I hadn't been on far west 14th street in ages, and while I knew it had changed, as much from conversations with others as from the occassional glance at magazines and all that -- dear god... it was like Soho circa 1986 -- huge cavernous clothing shops with no one in them, and tweed is even fashionable again. It was bizarre, and made me both melacholy and sort of strangely happy. It was a very full circle day, in every possible way. I was walking around singing Minstrel Boy because I'd been listening to the Black Hawk Down soundtrac again (which is working on the fact that I need to sit down and write on about six different projects, because that soundtrack is really tapping into the current spirit of several of things I keep stalling on).
Anyway.
So then I watched Maurice. Which of course I've seen, but not really in I suppose fifteen years. I blame all sorts of things on that film. Like my oxblood wingtips. Like my participation in the Roots of Western Tradition Living and Learning program at my university (a disaster of immoderate proporitons). There was a certain sort of education I wanted, a natural extension of the world Hewitt hinted at, and maybe, looking back on it, was the first impossible thing I pursued with my particularly patented form of irrationality. But in the end, while it wasn't anything like I'd hoped, I got what I wanted in a way. I mean, I did at least write a paper on Alexander the Great with cites from scholarly texts written in both Classical Greek and Latin in the mid-1800s. You know, all of that is just really starting to finally be funny. At any rate, it's a terribly formative movie for me (albeit mostly in the ridiculous pomposity of their friend who winds up getting sent to prison, but really, I always wanted to be just that sort of institigator in college, and I suppose anyone who has ever heard me drawl viciously about anyone knows that it's something I've never really stopped playing at). Anyway, the movie is lovely of course, but strange from so many vantage points -- my life, politics -- it all seems a little extraordinary now.
Which, somehow, brings us to the subject of Anne Rice. As I think half the free world knows by now she got into it with her (former)fans on the Amazon reviews. And not only did she get into it, she did so in a long ranty sort of way without paragraph breaks, solid logic or a command of punctuation and without an understanding that every preference a person has really doesn't have anything to do with her at all. I feel like I keep coming back to the Anne Rice thing here, mainly because I feel like I always preface it with a lot of disclaimers and then fail to make my point artfully, but I want to try again:
I am self-absorbed, vain and narcissistic in very particular ways. I view most things through the lens of its relevance to me, not just because it is human nature (and everyone who claims not to do it, does it just as much, they're just less artful, more shameful, or at least have more external distractions in their life than a relatively solitary creature such as myself). I know this, and I know that it frequently works against me, even as it is frequently a tool both to the realization of my ambitions and at the very least my own personal amusement. It's my nature, and it is what it is.
When I read The Vampire Lestat, I considered for the first time the possiblity that I wasn't a bad person just because I wasn't to other people's tastes, or was emotional, or cared for my solitude, or wanted more than I thought was reasonable. I became fond of the idea of Anne Rice the person -- we share a birthday and her birth name is actually Howard. I always liked that, and fancied what it would have been like had I been given a boy's name to keep secret, and her books were long a comfort to me even after their plots ceased to interest me, and the order and possiblity of her created world diminished so sharply in my eyes. When I saw Michael in San Francisco it was a terrible time, and I curled up in his borrowed bed reading that book again and wearing my ankh as he slept on the couch. We drank Bailey's and fought over that too, because it was there to fight over.
But when I was small, and I didn't know what it was like to have anyone other than my mother hold my hand, I used to imagine what it would feel like to have Lestat hold my hand, or Armand -- how his hands would be as small as my own, and even now I can still cycle through the differences of those imagined memories, pitch perfect and exact, weight and temperature of skin, preferences in the pressure of fingers. It's maybe one reason I started writing, not just to be less lonely, but because I could write anyone once I knew how I'd have to angle my head to look them in the eyes, or knew the size of their hands compared with my own.
I don't know what artists, or even those lesser creatures (*snerk*) celebrities, owe anyone. Probably nothing, all our myriad expectations aside. I met Anne Rice a few times at signings, and over the years I've known a myriad of people who both were her friends, and claimed to be her friends. I know that somewhere I once read that she writes notes for her projects on her walls, and writing on things not paper always became emblematic to me of a certain sort of madness I had no choice but to respect even as I was glad it was not me. She'd given herself over to something or other, her Lestat, her dead daughter... who knows. And I'm the sort of Romantic asshat that finds charm in these things, and respects them, not because there's anything fun about being fucked up, but if you're going to run with it... you do something with it, and that's hard. And I admire it. I have to.
But this whole thing on Amazon, well it makes me sad. I've not finished an Anne Rice book in years and years and years, and I don't mind. It doesn't matter if they're terrible, or maybe if I've just changed a lot. I still know how I've always seen certain characters smile, how the name Julien comforted me just for the sound of its syllables, and how I trembled when I first read The Vampire Lestat, knowing that my friends and I could sit around and talk about whether we'd choose the eternal life thing or not had the choice come to us as it did him, and that most of them wouldn't, and that maybe I was a little different, a little more daring than the coward I'd always been told I was, because I knew from the first, I'd say yes.
So it makes me sad. To see responses, not that are so ill-conceived (though they are and my god, if I don't know about typed apoplectic rage and self-absorption, who does?), but that effectively negate the very power of the things she's attempting to defend... it's so hard to explain, but it's like, her ideas, even if she's terrible at telling us about them -- even if she's rude and arrogant and odd -- they're strong forceful things, or else so many people wouldn't be writing entries like mine. They don't need her defense, and I wish she would listen to her strategic creatures. And I wish, both because I wish my nature was different and because I wish Anne Rice hadn't said all that stupid crap on Amazon, that it didn't make me sad. It's horrible, feeling embarassed for someone that helped me not to feel embarassed about myself. Even if she's a stranger. Even if it's all make believe.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-23 08:49 pm (UTC)Sadly that song is stuck to some Star Trek episode. I'm not sure if it was TNG or DS9, where they sang it over and over....
And oh 14th Street. Sometimes I miss those days.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-24 04:18 am (UTC)It's... not a relief, exactly, but somehow oddly comforting to know that I'm not the only person who's feeling that way about writing now.