Image courtesy of Brian Hughes. More of the same here.

Bad times in Los Angeles town. My bootleg wireless bit the dust, sending me into the Mercury Retrograde hell of Internet Access Disaster. A story too boring to summarize with sarcasm. Like an old friend of the blog once sang, “I wanna make a movie, so let’s star in it together. Don’t make a move til I say action. Here comes the hardcore life.”

So? What’s been the haps, paps?

The usual: writing, reading Wuthering Heights for the third time, talking boy poets down from ledges. The Freak Kingdom, its discontents and la casa de Kobek. What we do and how we do it.

I had a birthday. I’m thirty! My old pal and romantic interest, elly jonez, Escaped the Mission– which I believe was the title of a film starring Kurt Russell’s hipster second cousin– and visited the Freak Kingdom. Between anxiety attacks brought on by ferocious Concerns and Worries, she managed this photograph of my head exploding in a burst of incandescent radiance:

The Author at Thirty. Griffith Observatory. Surveying the Kingdom from on High.

Lack of Internet was all right. It’s always all right, every time. Speaking of photographs, I am reminded of an old Chestnut from December:

The Author at Twenty-Nine. Attending Lemon Pie Fayre.

Photocredit: Kaia “Katherine” Wong.

This New York Times article discusses the resonance of Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby with first and second generation Americans. Readers of the blog might recall the hypomanic episode of two months past, when the novel began an invasion of the lives of myself and my erstwhile chums. Since then, I haven’t stopped thinking about Gatsby– like, every day– and in this exact context: first generation Americans on the hustle-hustle for dollars dollars. After all, I’m one of their number. They is me. Me is they.

I ain’t dissing on kids 15 years younger, but by focusing on high school students, the article offers a pat distillation of every pedestrian and obvious interpretation of Gatsby. The fleeting Green Light, the limits of class, money, social-climbing and the American Dream. I suppose that’s all in the novel– they were Fitzgerald’s obsessions– but reading Gatsby for insights on these topics is like looking for milk in a pint of ice cream.

If the book has any power– and I think that it does– it isn’t as a morality tale about money, but as a series of interlocking portraits of the most repugnantly stupid and shallow characters in American Literature. A casual read will be dominated by the obvious repulsiveness of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, those careless people, but probing with any depth leaves the reader with the irredeemability of the novel’s other figures.

In the first few pages, Nick identifies himself as an Andy Warhol kind of guy– someone who’ll listen to your problems in silence, appearing to offer sympathy but is storing his queeny contempt for later judgment. His relationship with Gatsby is that of a Distinguished Gentleman and a rough trade rentboy– Gatsby humored as long as he’s amusing. Even Nick’s final comment– “You’re better than the whole damned lot!”– is offered not to establish a sympathy between the two men, but as a kindness given by Nick to himself. Everyone feels better when they pretend that they care about other people. But no one does. Nick is the devil, sheer evil. Hence the name.

But Jimmy Gatz. Wealth obscures truth. Even after Fitzgerald’s 30 page epilogue in which the false identity of Jay Gatsby is demolished, the money continues to hide his character. Reactions are usually about the American Dream or the impossibility of crossing class boundaries. Very rarely do you hear anything about Gatsby himself. So, lemme just say it: Jimmy Gatz was an idiot. That’s the point of the book.

Gatsby had a desperate smarts born of necessity but no wisdom and no ability to see a thing for its own nature. Not Daisy, not Tom, not Meyer Wolfsheim, not Nick and not his own self. The great line (later quoted by Bob Dylan in “Summer Days”), “What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.” is Gatsby’s unknowing epitaph– he dies because he does not understand Daisy. Some people, some women, are no good. But Gatsby can’t see it and returns to her, arms and wallet open, and she destroys him a second and then a third time. Even in his grand enterprise– climbing way up the social ladder– he’s a failure, and not because he’s nouveau riche non plus ultra, but because he’s stupid. His idea of wealth is throwing house parties and calling people Old Sport– dime novel fantasies of a school boy. He appears to Nick as what he’s fashioned himself: a freak.

Oddly, the only character that I find likable is Tom Buchanan. He’s as bad as the rest, but he never pretends that he isn’t– there’s simplicity in his acceptance of himself as a selfish, racist brute. Everyone else is a thief and a liar, but only Tom might admit it.

For reasons beyond cheapness, I prefer my books used. The transfer of knowledge and experience from owner to owner is a thing unique to the grey market, and makes one believe in an Iain Sinclair/Grant Morrisony idea that books, in their layered pages of information and content, are mystical objects radiating power outwards. (The one downside that I’ve encountered was olfactory. My first edition of Alfred Watkin’s The Old Straight Track reeked like an unembalmed corpse. I kept it outdoors and most of the odor dissipated– it remains a noxious volume, but only when opened.)

I bought Blake Nelson’s Exile in 2004– I had either read, or was about to read, his first novel Girl, which turned out amazing despite the atrocious film adaptation, and I was in the Connecticut Book Barn when I saw Exile’s partially lime green cover. It bore hideous ad copy: A DOWNTOWN BAUDELAIRE FOR THE ’90s.

“Well, self,” sez I, “This surely must be awful. You must give yourself over.”

And so I did. I paid $3.

Exile sat for some time. I read it months later, almost 3 years ago, in March of 2005. This was during the first or second week of a ridiculously painful break-up. It’s a far stronger book than Girl, an unsung masterpiece– a third person, year-long and present tense account of a writer’s life. 85% of it felt like reading my biography through vaseline. Like Girl, it’s a true book. Rare enough to write one, let alone two.

It was heavy enough reading Exile, but as I moved through its pages, I was confronted by the marginalia of its previous owner. Poetry and nonsense at first, but then notes directed at the person to whom she had given the book. It was like a second narrative layered on top of the first, what Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka Theatre community, would have Knowingly called a palimpsest. The second story took shape as one high school girl’s scribblings and lovenotes to her girlfriend, oozing the innocence of being 16 years old and thinking that her Love would last forever. It was almost too much.

The notes have a terrible fatalism. Someone had sold the book. Either the girl who’d written or the girl to whom she’d been writing. It isn’t hard to imagine their relationship crashing and burning, and the ruination and heartbreak that had followed. The book itself remained, a relic and a time capsule that was cast out into the wider world. It waited to consume an unsuspecting sucker with its implicit drama.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Myspace, I located a person that I believed was one of the girls. I thought about writing to her, to ask what had happened, to discover why this thing had been inflicted on me, but even in the low ways of 2005, I had a sense that this idea was awful. So I didn’t. But I’ve thought about those notes almost every day.

All I wanted was a crap book about a downtown Baudelaire for the ’90s.

When I was on the Winter Tour, I re-read my copy of Exile (and Girl too), and I decided that I’d scan the pages with marginalia. I’ve only omitted two: one was redundant, and the other was minor, but allowed a person to identify, in total, one of the girls.

And I ain’t that bad. Not yet.

Page 25, First Strike: “one day I was a princess / wearing a golden dress / (14 carat jewel gown) / don’t worry about me / I’m still a princess / I’m just a little tarnished / just a little rusted”

Page 43, Falling: “falling / i’m not sure / where i’m supposed / to be / except maybe / here? / i think so / i think so / i think so”

Page 61, First Note: “Hi / Katy / you / are / reading /my / book / (+my / writing / in the / margin / s”

Page 127, The Heartbreaker: “Katy… i’m writing you a note so that when you get to page 127, you can read a note from me beautiful me. I’m a rose, I’m a thorn growing off of myself. And everyone is talking about the burning sun. Birds fly south in Summer and my star is shining for you, always. 6/10/98 Gina”

Page 156, The Ephemera: “la di la di la”

Page 203, The Absolute Best: “I wanna sink to the / bottom with you”

Page 243, Stupidity: “VANDALISM OH DEAR”

Pages 273 & 274, We’re Definitely in High School: “FOR CHRISSAKE –> YOUR A POTATO”

Page 288, Last Page, The End: “lets drive forever / lets never forget / one day I will know everything”

Coven is one of the more obscure bands of the 1960s; a Chicago based outfit of quasi-Satanic occultists best known for a stage show incorporating wild antics, crucifixion, Black Masses and, one supposes, music. Their debut album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, is the most regarded, but I prefer the subsequent releases that move away from the vague Satanic proto-metal into an early ’70s dark schmaltz. This puts me in a minority. I recommend Blood on the Snow.

Though I’ve loved Coven for years, I am nothing compared against my aspiring hetero life partner, Andrew god-damn-the-man Harrison. In his monomaniacal quest for Knowledge, he hosts about 13,000 prog rock/psych radio shows and recently scored an interview with Coven’s vocalist, the self-proclaimed Queen of Goth, Jinx Dawson. You can listen here– the interview is at the 1/3rd mark, give or take. Take or give. Your choice.

Jinx reveals many shocking things and Andrew vaguely scandalizes her, but the high point comes towards the end when she shouts me out by name. I am one of her Magick Friends. Obviously a favor pulled by Harrison. I’ve got the best god damned friends in the world.

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Update: Harrison has his own blog dedicated to whatever obscure music is taking his whimsical fancy, both as a man and as a DJ. Douse yourself in his perfumed fineries at arcanaobscura.blogspot.com.

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Update #2:  The lovely Jinx Dawson kindly commented on this post & pointed out my error. Hi, Jinx!