Why Must You Write About Such Shameful Things?

(from Idleness, Bangkok section)

1. family hotel

Bangkok’s Malaysia Hotel: sex tourists and sex maniacs, dope fiends and dealers, whores of every stripe, and – Scandinavian families.  Always.

The restaurant at the Malaysia Hotel at midnight is like a porn convention double-booked with a twelve-step meeting.  And, there in the corner, is a beaming blonde family, rattling on in Swedish, the braless mother, the beer-drinking father, and two teenaged children getting their first look at the world.

What guidebook sends them here, year after year?  Or – is this some part of Scandinavian culture I just don’t know about?

I imagine the Mom and Dad, home at the end of the day in Stockholm, discussing the kids, “Olof is fourteen now.  And Pia will soon be thirteen.  Isn’t it time we introduced them to elderly queers in white spandex shorts and busty transgendered hookers?”

2. giant

The immensely tall Swiss man with the long blonde ringlets would like me to know that he is, in fact, a giant.  Not just figuratively.  Officially.

“Anything over six foot six is a giant.  I am six foot seven and a half.”  Not only that, he’s kicked his smack habit and possesses a sizable inheritance. 

He’s 45 or so, goes to the sauna every day, drinks beer, smokes pot, and gets laid about every twenty minutes.

It’s good to be a giant.

3. excuse me

I’m breakfasting with the giant and he says, “Oh, there’s my dealer.  Just a minute.”  He circles the pool a few times, then sits back down in a huff.

“Well!  If he didn’t go into the ladies toilet it’d be a lot easier to follow him inconspicuously, wouldn’t it!”

4.

The orange-haired queen who delivers room service has let the giant know that, for him, all services are available and free of charge.

The giant, for his part, enjoys wearing floppy faded old blue shorts and watching everyone at poolside freak, then attempt to guesstimate – if he’s that tall, and it goes that far down his leg. . .

It is conceivable that I, too, have a wistful puppy-begging-at-the-table type look on my face as well.

“Sorry, I’m as bad as any gay guy.  Worse, maybe.”

“Shallow as a birdbath,” says the giant, with a grin.

5. the voyeur

An update on the mad voyeur: he is still there, as he has been for more than a decade now, his gaze fixed upon the pool at the Malaysia Hotel.  His cloud of white hair and coke bottle glasses remain immobile, and he continues to stare, no matter how many newcomers stick out their tongues, or flip the bird, or even shake their fists at him.

Nowadays, the mad voyeur’s thing is giving shows.  (Is it true that all voyeurs dream of being exhibitionists, of possessing, for themselves, the same great force that smites them when they catch a glimpse of flesh?)

The mad voyeur hires two young men and leaves the curtains open.  The young men strip down, the voyeur positions them beside the window, and places between them, on the windowsill, a can of soda with a bendable straw. 

He sucks one young man’s cock, has a sip of soda, sucks the other.

This happens more or less every day in the window with the best view of the pool at the Malaysia Hotel.

6.

“Why must you write about such shameful things?” decent people have asked me, again and again, through the years.

I thought I ought to have an answer printed on a card, which I could then pass out.  Think of how convenient it would be at family events!

There are many reasons. 

Firmly in the lead, however, is:

“Because I have an abiding interest in what is actually going on.” 

7.

The trouble with going to bed mindful at sober at 10:30 pm is that I wake up at 3, boy-scout-ready to volunteer for any depravity whatsoever.

I guess I should be grateful that there’s virtually no sin available at this hour.

Though I suppose I could order something deep-fried from room service.

8.

In my opinion, it’s amazing that Bangkok manages to have any gay sex-for-sale industry at all.  Little wonder that its public face is pretty much confined to stubby Soi Twilight.

You’ve got to figure – it’s a totally different scene than heterosexuality.  Most everyone is obsessed with giving it away for free every chance they get.

Do the math.  Thousands of horny guys have flown thousands of miles, and spent thousands of dollars, to come have sex.  If they don’t succeed at least six times a day – note the pharmacies on every corner – they are going to feel cheated, deprived, and upset.  Every hotel in Bangkok is full of these sour-faced queens – fussy because they only got fucked twice today.

Even if you’re only average, you’ve got to figure – the place is full of addicts, with quotas to maintain.

9.

Being queer, it seems to me, is a profoundly anti-capitalist activity.  It’s one crazed worldwide queer potlatch: everybody just giving it away.

10.

Someday gay men may succeed in convincing straight men to please -- let us take care of that problem for you.

(It should be noted that millennia of concentrated effort have failed, as yet, to yield this goal.  Though we have convinced more or less everyone to worry about their abs and put gel in their hair.)

Should we ever succeed, it is likely that the economy of Thailand would be destroyed.  Followed by that of the world.

Governments would no doubt intervene against this crucial act of insubordination, the gravest since Gandhi marched to the coast and demonstrated that the ocean is full of free salt. 

The Life of a Stenographer

This state: when abruptly I find myself at ease with everything, as though I were receiving cosmic dictation; when it appears that everything has been prepared and I am merely the happy-go-lucky stenographer.

In this state, I receive messages. Which is nuts. And, when I follow these messages, my life improves. Which is lucky + nuts.

As I stand writing these notes, an orange tabby cat walks up to me, right here on the corner of a busy city block in Shinjuku. The orange cat sits on his back paws and stares right into me.

Because I wish to be sane -- which is perhaps a mistake -- I stop just shy of interrogating the cat.

Note:

about Idleness


Every day I write notes on cards and hope that they will turn into something, pull together, et cetera. But then I read Sei Shonagon, or Thoreau’s journal, or my master Kenko, and I find that I prefer notes “unassembled” or just barely. Of course, the result, “a miscellany” (which is called zuihuitsu in Japanese) is hardly recognized as a legitimate form nowadays. But maybe it is enough for me. And I hope very much that you, too, will find these pieces fun to read.

Do Not Seek Help

Do Not Seek Help.

(from Idleness, Tokyo section)

“What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts entered my head.”

-- Kenko, Essays in Idleness

1. Now?

Yes, accepting that there will be many more years of thankless labor and obscurity – before I fail decisively, that I will die tragically, or endure a long and pathetic old age, that my true friends will not be found, and everyone else will gradually abandon me -- keeping all this in mind – what would I like to do now?

                                                                                             

2.

Robin Gibb, is now any time to be dying? 

That which is so often disdained -- and seems to me uncommonly human, so very much like living: the falsetto.

3. Tokyo

To say that Tokyo is inhuman – is accurate but not particularly useful.  You may as well complain that clouds are inhuman, just because we can’t sit on them.  You may as well complain to what’s left of the reefs.

I cannot say what’s going on.  (Of course not.  It was not intended that I should understand.) 

Nonetheless, I have my theories.  These seven-story televisions, for example, which cover entire sides of buildings outside Shibuya station –

Could it be that someone is trying to flag down God?

4.

Do not seek help.  I recognize this is at variance to what is most commonly said.  That fact is: the humiliation and bother of asking for help far outweigh what small help is gained.

People are busy.  People are horrendously important.  It is best for one’s spirit and dignity to not confront these facts too directly.

In the end, only those people who understand will be of help.  And it is not possible to prod people into understanding.  You would think it would be possible.  It is not. 

4b.

Another way of saying this might be: seek professional help.  Seek ONLY professional help.

Of course, it may not be any good either.  But at least you pay dearly for it and it appears at the time noted on the card.

5. Highball in a Can.

Shin and Tetsuya, drunk in the smoking room at the baths, drink highball in a can from the vending machine, and slide in and out of their powder blue robes.

Shin has clearly undergone a few calamities – but who hasn’t by the age of 35?  Anyway, he’s still that most precious of bathhouse commodities: cute.

Tetsuya is 45, sells wig for a living, and is afraid his life is over because he’s getting old, and wig business is down, and also because he has a very, very small penis.  He opens his robe and shows it to me.  “He has a clitoris,” says Shin, very helpfully.

Tetsuya nods sadly down on it. 

6.

Insanity is no obstacle to close personal relationships.

Actually, it helps.

7.

It is not possible to prod people into understanding.  At best you might trip them in exactly the right way so that they fall upon the curb and break their nose so that, while recuperating in the hospital, they might meet a nurse who might (or might not) say something revealing.

You can trip folks if you like, but the nurse is not in your employ.

8.

Attempts at immediate pain relief almost always make everything drastically worse. 

Such attempts are nearly unavoidable.

Consider yourself warned.

9.

It is no wonder that Tokyo cherishes promiscuity.  The cherry trees, the chrysanthemum exhibition, and fucking around are pretty much all the nature we have left. 

10. Misery T-shirt

This state: when the suffering of strangers on the train is so evident that it might as well be emblazoned on the front of their shirts.

Forever Disappointed. . . or     My Death is Well Underway. . . or     Alcoholic Grapefruit Soda is My Last Remaining Pleasure. . .

The solid cloud of misery around people on the train, like sickly sweet perfume in an elevator.

It is instructive and gruesome to contemplate: how many people experience almost no happiness whatsoever.    

11.

What can be cobbled together by trusting in complete nonsense?  (What else have I been doing, my entire life?)

12. Function

If I manage, in this process, to note down a few words that serve as consolation and good company to those well-advanced in despair, so that we may indefinitely postpone offing ourselves, then it could be said that this became, in spite of itself, a useful text.

13.

After a mile of shotengai, a dozen blocks of the crowded covered shopping street, he happened to turn his head and see the temple, like a great brown bird with wings outstretched, and was so shocked he actually spoke out loud to it, What are you doing here?

The temple said, I’ve been sitting here for seven hundred years.  The rest just came along.

14.

Doing the next right thing, the next thing on the list, regardless of how one feels about it, is often correct.

15. Follow Through

I’ve never been much good at completing projects.  This has very likely impeded whatever small chance I had for success. 

It is probably also the reason why I still haven’t ever quite gotten around to killing myself.

Therefore it may be said that there are real advantages to being “weak at execution”.

16. Anyway

Many years ago I used to hang around a gay long-distance trucker from Castle Rock who, though not by nature much given to reassurance, would say,

Man, you’re here anyway – you might as well see how it turns out.

17. Bucket

It is extremely unlikely that anything worthwhile can be accomplished without checking in regularly with Fernando Pessoa, who had this to say, on the fifth of April, 1920, to his on-again, off-again love Ophelia Queiroz.

So long: I’m going to lay my head down in a bucket, to relax my mind.  That’s what all great men do, at least all great men who have: 1) a mind, 2) a head, 3) a bucket in which to stick their head.

The Party Organizer

Bangkok, 2012

Recently I had the opportunity to share breakfast with one of the most desirable men in Bangkok.  As a gay man, there are two ways to have one’s popularity more or less guaranteed.  One is to have a large penis.  The other is to possess the means and willingness to pay for drugs – not only for oneself, but also for one’s friends. One’s no doubt numerous friends.  This gentleman was one of those enviable few who possess both advantages. 

I assure you I did nothing to merit this grace.  The French musclemen seated nearby shot me jealous looks. 

I do not doubt this stellar gentleman received no fewer than a hundred messages on grindr and gayromeo, on gaydar and recon, while we sat together savoring our coffee and carrot banana muffins.

Our conversation, unfortunately, will not be of interest to anyone.  First, because it is one of the very most common conversations.  Second, because it regards topics that all decent people have agreed to pretend do not exist.

Nowadays, being gay is about getting a gay marriage – and outfitting a home in style.  Straight people have recently decided we are acceptable.  We wouldn’t want them to change their minds now.  Tiptoes everyone!  Assimilate and consume, that is the theme.  The goal is to be tasteful at great expense.

We’ve left our messy and embarrassing past behind us.  Can you remember?  We were homosexuals then.  All that is finished.

Promiscuity is passé, as the editor of a gay spirituality magazine announced to me.  So, too, presumably, are blue jeans, which everyone is wearing -- and shoving down to their ankles at damn near every opportunity.

Drugs, as everyone knows, are BAD, which is why they have been universally abandoned, like white sugar, beef, cigarettes, and television.

Therefore, anything I write is guaranteed to be both uninteresting and unacceptable.  However, just as birds need nests and party boys require tabs of ecstasy – I have a compulsion to write essays.  I have a quota, understand.  Therefore, I will relate our conversation even though it will not be interesting and later everyone will be compelled to pretend they heard and know nothing.

My interlocutor, as you can imagine, was of the cream of Thai society, one of the very best families.  (Oh, to inherit both money AND large genitals – surely this man’s deeds in his past life were extraordinary.  I would rush into a burning building tonight if I were guaranteed to emerge thus outfitted and equipped!)

The face of this gentleman – one of the most desirable in Bangkok – was lightly pockmarked.  His hair was thinning.  He was 45 at least.  Still, he no doubt took some consolation in knowing that the entire city was willing to do damn near anything to get into his pants.  And his medicine cabinet.

The gentleman’s conversation, with exquisite tact and courtesy, was hovering around the fact that I was nowhere near good enough for him.  This was blessedly unnecessary.  I no more expected to be his consort than Justin Bieber’s.  Nonetheless, I did not wish to interrupt his train of thought.  I was glad just to be near him.

He was explaining that he was not available, not at any time in the future and, above all, not this coming weekend.  He was in charge of a party.  “I am the party organizer,” he said.  “Everyone says I am the best.”  He was an acknowledged authority on the best way to have a party.  He was the expert. 

The first thing to consider was the number of guests.  The number must never be even – because then guys just couple off and head to the corners to fuck.  Mixing requires an odd number.  Three is the minimum number – but, how boring is that?  Nine, it is well-known, is too many.  People steal, he explained.  Even people you think would never steal.

Thus, there would be seven people at his party.  Four Thai and three farang.  If he had his way, he admitted, there would be more farang – but his friend preferred Thais and the party was at his house.  He had his own pool.

It would be a magnificent party and he would arrange everything because he was the expert.  The trouble was it was very expensive.  (There was no question but that he would pay for everything.  And that whatever outlay was required was perfectly insignificant to him.  Still, he wished for me to know the details of his munificence.)

He knew everyone already, of course.  He would select, from his hundreds of acquaintances, the very best.  The men, however, did not know each other.  Therefore an icebreaker was required.  Half a tab of ecstasy would do the trick.  But E was appallingly expensive now.  At least a thousand baht a tab.  So, imagine, he’d already spent 4000 baht and the party had just started.

Then there was the main event – the ice.  He’d need two bags.  Actually he’d buy a third and keep it in his car.  In case the party went on long.  Which is the tendency with meth, after all – to go on and on and on.

To come down from the meth, they’d need GHB, at least 200ml, which would mean having enough for this party and the next few special occasions.

GHB, he said, was one of his very favorite drugs.  It was perhaps his personal favorite.  Indeed, I could hear the fondness in his voice, as though he spoke of a beloved grandparent.  The trouble with GHB, he said, was that you had to be a little bit careful, because you could very easily kill yourself.

The first time he did GHB he was getting fucked by two studs in his personal sling.  (He had it imported specially, he said.  It cost a fortune!)  He had a little and oh it was heaven, but then one of the tops poured a little more directly into his mouth.  He didn’t measure or anything, he just said, That looks like enough.

For a few minutes it was wonderful, but then it was like a tornado inside me!  He locked himself into the bathroom and puked and shit, both ends going nonstop.  Because of his medical training (excuse me for not mentioning this before) he knew he could easily die if he lost consciousness and so he kept his eyes pried open with his fingers.

It was one of the worst things that every happened in his life, he said, but, since he didn’t die, he has to say it was great. 

That’s why, when he organizes a party, he always decorates with syringes and makes sure everyone measures.  Not for nothing is he one of the best _____ in Thailand.  As well as the person most to be desired, if you are organizing a party.

At this point the gentleman paused and smiled at me above his coffee.  He waited.  I knew what was expected of me and I obeyed.

“So – these parties of yours?  How does a guy get chosen?  Is there an application process?  Can I interview?  Letters of recommendation?  Admission fees?”

He looked at me pityingly, and with real pleasure. 

I did not qualify.  Of course not. 

These men, I must understand – were exemplary.  They were wealthy and well brought up, they were hung and uncircumcised, fully versatile, charming, downright beautiful.

Taking out his iphone, he showed me their pictures.  He did not exaggerate.  Everyone of them was gorgeous, as well as rich and respectable-looking.  The sort of gay man that gay men want to marry.  And straight people find charming and tasteful.  The absolute right kind of gay.

Breakfast was over.  He had to be going.  He had so many errands to run, so many appointments, so many friends and lovers.  Life can be very busy, especially if you are one of the most desirable men in Bangkok, and have a party to organize.

Meanwhile, I had nothing.  No anxious lovers, no parties to attend, no occupation other than to write about the very most common things, which everyone has agreed to pretend do not exist.

I worried that I might always be one of those negligible persons, who pass beneath notice, awash in the hope that we might be among those permitted to live out, unnoticed and un-chosen, our unimportant lives.  That hope our only luck, our only solace.  That sweet relief. 

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Wasted World

Rob Hengeveld 
Wasted World: 
How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet

The University of Chicago Press, 2012

If I could choose the next runaway bestseller, the next Tuesdays with Morrie – 206 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list! – it would be this brilliant and essential book.  That will never happen.  This has got to be one of the least heart-warming books on the planet.  And one of the most important.

I admit I have become fond of books that begin, as this one does, with the statement that the book “is not optimistic in its contents or in its conclusions.”  What a relief.  The author intends to treat me as an adult and tell me the truth.  I’ve grown leery of optimists.  If the firemen arrive while your house is in flames, do you demand that they stop first on your doorstep and tell you that your future is rosy?

We are using up the last of our resources and burying ourselves in waste.  We have very nearly reached the end, and we still go on pretending that nothing is happening, that growth is eternal, that we have, in some hidden pocket, unlimited worlds to squander.

Chapter by chapter, Rob Hengeveld shows what we have done – the exhaustion of resources, the loss of biodiversity, the creation of a world that is ever-more abstract and prone to collapse.  I imagined him sometimes as a cranky uncle, determined to explain everything so that even I (who am a little slow) will understand.  Step by step, process by process, he goes on explaining, not necessarily cheerful, but painstaking and patient. 

The great benefit (even pleasure) of this book is that on nearly every page I found myself thinking, “Yes, I heard about that before, but I did not understand it.”  Hengeveld is extraordinarily gifted at making difficult issues and processes clear and understandable.  I have no math or science background, yet I was able to understand.  Looking at a chapter title like “The Energy and Information Content of Society”, I thought, “What chance have I got?” -- yet he guided me through it and I understood.

Looking back at my notes, I am amazed how much I was able to learn in 300 pages.  It seems as if there are 1500 pages of information.  He makes vast and complicated issues clear and immediate.  For example, although people may be aware that we are running out of oil and water, how many realize that we are running out of phosphorus, of potassium, even helium!  And we cannot live without phosphorus any more than we can live without water.

I have never found such clear and riveting depictions of the loss of freshwater, biodiversity and essential nutrients, of the continents of plastic filling our oceans and the poisons in our air, water and soil.  If you read this book, you will understand why even the change of even a fraction of degree in the Earth’s temperature matters tremendously, why a newly planted forest does not reconstitute an ancient one, why ‘carrying capacity’ is a misleading idea, why an abstract world is increasingly prone to collapse.

If Hengeveld is a “cranky uncle”, always keeping an eye on numbers, processes and proofs, explaining everything step by step, that only makes it more powerful when his descriptions open up into an anguished and utterly informed lament for the Earth, for all the natural and human wonders we are on the verge of losing.  The beauty and emotion startles and convinces, like a cranky uncle who suddenly sings in a sonorous baritone. 

This book, if it receives any attention at all, will be attacked.  Because it shows plainly and vividly that “business as usual” cannot and will not go on.  And that is the very last thing we are willing to hear.  The solutions he proposes are mortifying – but the alternative is to consent to the death of billions.   

The content and conclusions of this book may feel emotionally and psychologically  overwhelming.  Particularly because, when you close its covers, you return to a world where virtually everyone acts as if nothing is going on, as if “business as usual” can go on forever.  If you find your emotions challenging or hard to bear, I warmly recommend that you read Joanna Macy’s Active Hope. 

Although I learned a lot from Bill McKibben’s Eaarth and David W. Orr’s Down to the Wire, I think that Wasted World is now the best overview available of our global environmental situation – also known as “life on Earth”.  I plead with you to read it.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Quim Monzo

Guadalajara

Quim Monzo

Translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush

Open Letter, 2011

Prospective readers of this book, should they be warned?  No, no.  More fun to say nothing.  Perhaps they will embarrass themselves, as I did, while reading “Family Life” in an upscale Tokyo café.  When the nostalgic carpet of coziness it extends was – abruptly amputated -- I made a few high-pitched yipping noises and sat on my hands.

Short story collections are like pop albums – a few catchy numbers up front, then repeats or filler.  Guadalajara is no exception to this rule – except that the best stories are so marvelous they deserve to last forever.  There are, it seems to me, at least three great stories here: “Family Life”, “Centripetal Force” and “The Lives of the Prophets.”

These are stories that capture perfectly the way we live now.  As such, they deserve to become a sort of shorthand, like Kafka’s beetle.  I want all my friends to read these stories, so that all I’ll ever need to say is “today I felt like a fireman in Centripetal Force”.  I’d like to be able to just say “he’ll be turning nine soon” and watch everyone in the room shiver and fidget in their chairs. 

The other stories are clever and well-done – it’s just that the patterns that propel them may become so apparent that the stories seem only like brilliant exercises, the execution of an idea, with nothing real at stake. 

Then again, “The Lives of the Prophets” seemed at first the most pattern-bound of all – I could hardly bear to read it – until it spun around and surprised me.  The disappointment I felt when I guessed where some of the stories were headed – made me all the more delighted  to be wrong.     

SOME ADVICE TO MYSELF, FOR USE WHEN ENTIRELY DESPERATE

SOME ADVICE TO MYSELF, FOR USE WHEN ENTIRELY DESPERATE

Section A

1.

Thinking is not your friend.

As complete abstinence from thought is not possible, keep discursiveness to a minimum.

Above all, avoid “figuring out”.

2.

I thoroughly approve of the magazine rack I see here before me, with titles like: VIRGIN HARLEY, GARAGE LIFE, ON THE BOARD, PERFECT BOAT, BIKER-MON, and THRASHER.  On the cover of nearly all these titles, a person appears ecstatic, suspended in mid-air.

Ideally the world would be saved very quietly, so that all the foolishness could just go on.

3. tulip tree

Instead of thinking – observe.

Despite its bad reputation, there’s a lot to be said for the external world.  In fact, it may be attempting to rescue you.

 

This tulip tree here on the corner, which just three days ago appeared a virgin at the altar, and is now that same bride in the same dress after a 72 hour orgy.  The tulip tree is waving to you in her spoiled tatters, reminding you that, contrary to what monotheists claim, virginity keeps coming around.

4. schedule

Five days of responsible pragmatism, compassionate engagement, budgeting, et cetera.  Followed by two days of batshit crazy.

Still, he feels some security in knowing he has a schedule.

5. hall

Something essential about Tokyo, it seems to me, is expressed in corridors like this one. Here at Motomachi-Chukagai station, between the ticket gates and exits 1 and 2.  A hall short enough to walk and too long to imagine, with white tiles and a low ceiling, so long and featureless you assume at first it has to be a trick with mirrors.

6.

Some people, as soon as you hear them say, “I made it through” – you know they didn’t.

7. drink

Expat children beside the magazine rack, with Japanese faces and American voices.

“At the hotel I gave them my card, right, so I could drink as much as I want.  Turned out I drank san ju man en, three hundred thousand!

It’s not even a disaster.  In the next breath he talks about his girlfriend, where they’re going next.

8. scuba

These two cardboard figures, for example, here in the lobby of the Tip X gym in Shibuya. They appear to be wearing scuba masks.  What’s the message supposed to be?

Consider the enormous delicacy of Tokyo, the unparalleled discretion and tact, the fact that I have managed to live here for nearly a decade, without ever knowing what the hell is going on.

9. exercise

Buddhist wisdom is very helpful.  However, if you do not have the time or inclination, or if you always meant to learn but never got around to it -- aerobic exercise works as well or better.

10.

Thirty seven minutes after midnight on the Namboku Line and everyone (everyone) in this train car is drunk.  Drunk passed out with their mouths open.  Drunk peering into their phones as if into a bottomless well.

Drunkenly looking around, he wonders, “Is it so terrible just to be here?”

11.  hook

With some people it’s very tricky.  Because it’s not like you can actually see the hook in their lip or their flank.  The rusty bit of iron that run clear through their throat.  The slave irons, the wire that binds their feet.

And yet the hook is there somewhere, almost always.

12. clues

Here in the lobby of the luxury gym, beside the newspapers and the stacks of manga, are full-scale replicas of

a)      a head of cauliflower

b)      a bunch of white asparagus

Perhaps these clues have been placed here to remind us of the dreamlike quality of the world.  Unfortunately it is not possible to look back now and pinpoint – was the world real at some point?

13.

A large sign at Shibuya station reads FIGHT JAPAN!

I know what they mean, but I also think it is increasingly possible that they also mean it the way I mean it too.

I struggle to explain, when people ask, “Is it difficult to be a foreigner in Japan?”

Yes, it is difficult.  But it is nowhere near as difficult as it is to be Japanese in Japan. 

14.

It is commonly assumed that foreigners stay in Tokyo for the money.  In fact this is rarely the case.

Overwhelmingly, foreigners stay in Tokyo because they get away with things here that they could not possibly get away with anywhere else.

I should say “we”.

15. hook

May I concoct within myself that hook-dissolving elixir.  The antidote for poison, wire, glass, nail, bomb.  That which aches, burns, bites.  That which is irretrievable.  That which is beyond repair.

May it melt.  May it melt.  May it melt.

16. my Tokyo

It can also be a tremendous comfort – the gray anonymity, the hygiene and privacy of it.  Like the small room in the hospital where they bring you to tell you that your sweetheart is gone. 

It is possible, even then, to feel grateful for that airless and colorless room.  For the simple gray emptiness of it, for the fact it does not attempt to console.  For the comfort and security of knowing you could bleed to death and not stain anything.

17. anyone?

Perhaps you are waiting for someone?

Now that we’ve begun – maybe it makes sense for someone else to arrive?

But in Tokyo it takes a long time for people to come along.  Sometimes a very long time.

18. identifying marks

Shinjuku around 8 in the morning:

A high school boy’s uniform, still in the style of war.  From his backpack, a bushy animal tail bounces as he walks.

The sweet-faced octogenarian has a marijuana leaf embroidered on his baseball cap.

A white bus with tinted windows and the slogan PREMIUM DREAM.

19.

Are you remembering to not figure anything out?

Do not attempt to figure anything out.

20. manual

A kind of instruction manual.  For when you cannot go on.

The sort of friend who just gets in her car and comes over.

21. messenger

Always the same:

The people who most need help – do not attend.  The disaster is already underway.  The nightmare’s in full-swing.  Also: rent’s due, phone’s ringing, something’s burning, what’s that kid bawling over now?

Always: 

How to help and how to get help through?

I cannot even figure out a way to get a message to myself, that nearby person.  Often underfoot, often exceedingly faraway. 

22. theory

He has a theory he ought to behave as if he were about to be rescued.  As if it has all been arranged: a helicopter, an exorcist, an artist’s grant.  Now all he needs do is compose himself and act calm, as though he’d been calm all along, confident he is about to be rescued, certain he deserves to be saved.

He knows there’s nothing to this.  It buys him time.

23. disappears

Once a week he disappears in Tokyo.  Wide-awake at 5am, everything he needs springs into his bag.  Bounding down the stairs, he jaunts to the station, buys a hot can of espresso from the vending machine. 

The train is still peaceful at that early hour, though even then there is no place to sit.  Props himself in the corner, and reads John Ashbery, as the Circle Line goes round.  Happiness is coming, he thinks.  When in fact the very best moment is already underway.

24.

My mind has only these tiny baby hands.  Almost transparent.  Holding on as hard as they can.

25.

Breakfast he eats at the counter in a cheap place near Shinjuku South Exit.  A double portion of minced raw tuna and a raw egg, which he unofficially believes makes him just slightly bionic.

26. petition

If I believed in prayers of petition, I would say to the mystery, Give me some small task I can actually do or allow me to die.

Dearest mystery.  I trust that you will not mind if I live as though you had said, Take notes.

27. pleasure

He’s never heard anyone mention it, but it is for him the great pleasure of Tokyo.  The essential pleasure.

After transferring twice or perhaps three times, he exits the station, turns off the main street, turns left twice, then right again, and finds himself in front of a coffee shop.  It is the faultlessly bland branch of a ubiquitous chain.  Entering, he orders a coffee, carries it up three flights of stairs, and looks for a seat in the corner.

There, he organizes his thoughts and sips the tasteless coffee with real pleasure, certain that he will not be found. 

Forthcoming: RFD

The story "Children in the Invisible World" is forthcoming in RFD, in the upcoming issue on "Sex Magic" edited by Paul Wirhun.  Thank you radical faeries!

 An illustration for "Pa, Randy and the Sugarhouse Fire" by Tokyo-based artist Akemi Shinohara.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Borges

Jorge Luis Borges, On Mysticism

edited with an introduction by Maria Kodama

Penguin Classics, 2010

Is this book necessary?  Ninety percent of it is already available in the three canonized volumes of Borges’ fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  What’s new here seemed to me very minor – thumbnail sketches of Santayana and Schopenhauer, and an essay on Berkeley that Borges wrote when he was 24.

Yet I am so glad I bought and read it.  The great canonical volumes of Borges have been made.  They sit on my shelf.  I’m grateful for them.  Now it is necessary to take them apart again.  I was glad to have a focus and a path, a small selection made by no less than Maria Kodama, Borges’ literary executor and widow.

Rereading stories I’d read years before – The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, The Circular Ruins, The Aleph -- I found them more amazing than I remembered.  Over the years my small-capacity mind had reduced them to clevernesses, to delightful mental math problems.  They are so much more than that.  I am embarrassed to admit that I thought, “The translation has really been improved.  It is much more fresh.”  I am delusional.  The translation, by Andrew Hurley, is exactly the same.

I do not know if this book is essential, but certainly it is delightful.  I loved to be guided, to have the chance to look again, to carry a little Borges along on the train.  

"Juice Box" in Epiphany

The new issue of Epiphany is at newsstands now (Barnes & Noble is the best place to find it apparently) and includes my essay "Juice Box" about life in the monastery in Dharamsala, several of my all time favorite hustlers and an incredibly awful dog, Stinky, whom I miss terribly.

Children in the Invisible World.

One thing I worry about a lot is Hasids. Those Hasids have got first-rate mystics. They’ve got mystics you seriously would not want to mess with. What those Hasid mystics say is that from every act of sex a child is born, if not here, then in the invisible world.

Naturally this worries me a lot.

And I think that I had better take it easy now and study up and brace myself because after death there’s going to be, whoa baby, a tidal wave of sudden fatherhood.

Like an old tomcat beneath a tree I die forgotten and alone, and wake to find myself within a cavernous stadium. DADDY! Booms the crowd and stampedes toward me.

Let me explain! I had no idea! I never thought!

Like every father, I make excuses.

I shudder now as I imagine the hunger of my nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine children, born into the invisible world from backrooms and public johns, from cubicles and shower stalls, from steam rooms and alleys. That savage smut-nosed tribe of guttersnipes and urchins, of pyromaniacs and narcissists and honor students gone AWOL. The steaming breath of children conceived in the sauna. The all-seeing children born from blowjobs in the dark. The children conceived while fucking in the sling who belong neither to heaven nor to the earth.

Those conceived in a bed consider themselves an elite corps and are insufferably snobbish.

Every child demands the attention it deserves. Has an argument and an opinion. Artwork for the refrigerator, paperwork requiring a parent’s signature. Is fighting with his sister, wants tenderness, seeks tuition.

My children have learned, as I learned, to survive within their father’s inattention, in the overgrown empty lot of his boundless negligence. Like my father, I have lived as though I were the only one important, while the invisible children were all the time looking on, and crying out, and waving their little hands to no effect.

There is also a small contingent of spectators who were, in the visible world, working mothers. What tremendous pleasure they receive from watching my attempts to maintain, in the invisible world, my homo status quo!

“Thank you so much, dear children. It was really so very lovely to meet you all. Now if you don’t mind, if you’ll just excuse me, I am going to brew myself a cappuccino and settle down for some serious reading.”

HA!

My children. My nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine children. Whose birthday is today, who has allergies, who will eat the crust and who must have the crust cut off? How many cavities? How many bicycles? How much money for bail? For all eternity I will bemoan my children’s vanity, their insatiability, and their jug ears – all qualities of mine.

I will love them for their father, their other father, whom I insist I really did love, even it was just for five minutes in an alley in the dark.

The nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine fathers of my nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine children.

One of whom reminds me of my children now as we stand in the back of the bar and he calls me Daddy and we take turns slapping each other upside the head.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Darcy O'Brien

A Way of Life, Like Any Other

Darcy O’Brien

New York Review of Books 1977, 2001

I learned of this book from a British newspaper, in a list of forgotten books that deserved to be rediscovered. I chose it from the list almost by chance. How lucky I feel now, like someone traveling in a foreign city who meets an old friend by chance.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a picaresque tale of Hollywood in the fifties, hilarious and scathing. A novel, almost a memoir. The protagonist (like Darcy O’Brien himself) is the child of two Hollywood stars in decline.

At first glance you might mistake the book for one of those happy/sad accounts of famous parents that turn up now and then in The New Yorker magazine. But this novel is much funnier and sadder and not nearly so harmless. Darcy O’Brien is willing to be angrier than almost anyone will admit to being nowadays. His account of his mother’s defeat by a Christmas Pudding is very funny and very sad, but most of all it is furious.

Demolishing several lives in 155 pages, this is a novel in a delicious hurry, racking up conquests and disasters at a careening speed that seems both fun and generous, like a brilliant friend who buys your drinks all night and says, “Brace yourself. I’m going to tell you everything.”

How this book has avoided becoming a famous movie is a total mystery. The closest thing to a moral comes on page 105: “No child aspires to repeat the tragedy of his parents but must avert the compulsion to do so.”

A Way of Life, Like Any Other on sale at the New York Review of Books site.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Keizo Hino

Keizo Hino, Isle of Dreams

Dalkey Archive, 2010

translated by Charles de Wolf

I’ve lived in Tokyo for almost a decade now and it often seems to me that, although thirty million people live in Tokyo, almost no one looks at it. This book attracted me first because it aims to look. I was also enchanted by its first paragraph, which seemed to me the way all books ought to begin –

“When our consciousness begins to change, for better or for worse, events around us seem to fall in line, starting with mere coincidences, hardly worth noting. Of course, how could it be otherwise?”

What follows is the tale of a widower wandering in Tokyo’s reclaimed land: a wasteland built from waste. He nearly gets run down by a woman on a motorcycle and begins a journey through the heart (or guts) of Tokyo.

I live in Tokyo and read endlessly; some of my friends are literature professors or translators, yet I had never heard of this book and, when I try to speak of it to people, I nearly always get a blank look. Yet it is a stunningly strange and interesting book and one of many reasons to be grateful to the Dalkey Archive Press.

Certainly it is not a book for everyone. To whom do I recommend it? To architects, ecologists, and anyone obsessed with Tokyo, mannequins, or trash. Also to fans of Kafka, J.G. Ballard, Joseph Conrad. It is essential for anyone interested in ecological literature – though it certainly provides no obvious moral!

A bit of advice: the first half dozen chapters have a peculiar awkwardness and artificiality that will make sense – but only in retrospect. Persist!

Isle of Dreams on sale at the Dalkey Archive site.

La Cucharita

a small fiction from Santiago de Chile

I never steal anything. I stole this spoon. Just walked away with it. At the airport in Santiago – where it turns out to be almost impossible to buy a cup of coffee after eleven o’clock at night. At last I found one place. Slammed, of course. I was handed a paper cup, a plastic lid, instant coffee and this spoon. I found a seat by my gate, sat down and found this spoon still in my hand. It was the only real thing I’d been given. I kept it.

It’s a stainless steel spoon. The simplest possible spoon. Which is already excellent. It does nothing to invite desire. Almost nothing can be said of it. It cannot be praised enough.

This was not the spoon I wanted. Of course not. I know the spoons I was aiming for. The tiny spoons in G’s kitchen that I used to make instant coffee every morning. In his apartment on Santa Maria, just beside the river, with a view of the trees flowering on the cerro. Every day, three tiny spoonfuls of sugar and three of Nescafe. Plus milk.

Despite its proximity to some of the best coffee in the world, Chile runs on Nescafe. Something about taxes. It’s the same reason books are so exorbitant. I would have thought it was impossible to create a decent society without filter coffee and cheap paperbacks – but Santiago does it. At its center at least, Santiago is faultlessly clean and secure. And Pio Nono is part of that, where the students go to drink and carouse. Or the park, where couples remain lip-locked for hours, unable to move until the automatic sprinklers turn on. Of course it is still possible to get mugged late at night in the park, if you really insist on it.

I kept the spoon. I walked away without thinking. During my last hour in Santiago, where I lived once upon a time. And was happy. It’s too terrible to think about. I kept the spoon. Only the spoon was real. The coffee was fake.

But even as cheap wine produces drunkenness, powered coffee may result in euphoria. As it did sometimes for me, as I sat drinking Nescafe and looking out the enormous window at the jacaranda blooming on the side of Cerro San Christobal. The jacaranda bloomed the whole three months I lived in G’s apartment. It faded only at the very end.

And I am not opposed either to the Virgin Mary standing atop the cero with her arms outstretched. I just think the jacaranda says it better.

I liked to look out the window as I drank Nescafe and studied irregular verbs. (I prefer projects that have no end and no chance of success.) I studied every morning until euphoria gave way to nerves, until G came down the hall – sleepy eyed, completely naked – and stood talking to me from the far corner of the room so that the neighbors wouldn’t see him.

“Come here,” I said.

He smiled at me, a wicked imp beneath his tangled long gray hair.

“C’mon.”

Give the neighbors something to live for. Just as the sun clears the roof – a bare naked man! Don’t leave exhibitionism to porn stars. Porn stars are beautiful certainly. Whether they are naked is debatable.

But you just stood there, naked at the end of the hall, and talked to me. At least I got to see.

Those mornings began with a very small spoon. Spoon, jacaranda, irregular verbs, naked man. I coveted those little spoons. I wanted to steal them, to take them with me when I had no choice but to leave Santiago. Perhaps I hoped to grow a jacaranda.

But I absolutely never steal anything. So I didn’t steal the spoon from G. I stole a spoon from the airport instead. I seriously doubt that I can grow a naked man from this particular spoon. Maybe I can grow an airplane.

From G I stole a dictionary. A compact Spanish-English dictionary with an orange plastic cover. I did not intend to steal the dictionary, though I found it very convenient. I carried it with me everywhere. I forgot it wasn’t mine.

G will miss his dictionary. He has very few possessions. Not like an airport has spoons. He keeps only exactly what he needs. And now I have stolen his dictionary.

I will tell him that I’ll send it back. I’ll promise. I won’t send it back.

It’s true I wanted the dictionary. It’s a very convenient and also very pleasant object. Orange, soft plastic, fits nicely in the hand. I wanted it before I forgot it wasn’t mine.

If you look up the small spoon in the dictionary, what you get is la cucharita.

G won’t blame or demand. He will give his small dictionary up for lost. Anyway he gives everything to his friends. Bring it with you when you come back, he’ll say. Knowing that I may never.

The important things in my life, I am careful to never think about. Instead I have a compact Spanish-English dictionary and a small spoon.

A flowering tree, a naked man, a city in midsummer.

I found it in my hand. I walked away with it.

It cannot be praised enough.

I forgot it wasn’t mine.

from John Ashbery's poem "Pyrography"

(Somehow it makes perfect sense that the best writing manifesto I've read recently would be a piece of an old poem by John Ashbery.)

. . . Therefore, since we have to do our business

In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?

That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

Channeling itself into history, will unroll

As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,

And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

Tip one's hat to and still get some use out of.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago, All The Names

Harcourt, 1999

Years ago, I used to carry around a copy of the later stories of Chekhov, which I referred to as “my artificial heart” because the book seemed to me so radiant with human understanding that it might well restart my heart if I should falter.

I have found a new heart. Like Chekhov, Saramago uses the novel to investigate and invoke compassion. Or, as a shepherd in the novel declares, “I don’t believe one can show greater respect than to weep for a stranger.”

Previously obsessed with celebrity, a government clerk finds himself following the trail of a random name. He seeks to know her, and fails -- as we all fail each time we open a newspaper or a phone directory or go for a walk in the street. Yet the clerk nonetheless arrives at love, and so perhaps can we.

This book reminds me of the long and convoluted guided meditations Tibetan Buddhists use to awaken compassion in the heart, meditations which aim to arouse love even for those who are distant and unknown.

It is possible that literature could have some higher purpose than this. But I have no idea what it could be.