Summary entry in The Encyclopedia Britannica:
Herman Melville, orig. Herman Melvill, (born Aug. 1, 1819, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 28, 1891, New York City), U.S. writer. Born to a wealthy New York family that suffered great financial losses, Melville had little formal schooling and began a period of wanderings at sea in 1839. In 1841 he sailed on a whaler bound for the South Seas; the next year he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. His adventures in Polynesia were the basis of his successful first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). After his allegorical fantasy Mardi (1849) failed, he quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), about the rough life of sailors. Moby-Dick (1851), his masterpiece, is both an intense whaling narrative and a symbolic examination of the problems and possibilities of American democracy; it brought him neither acclaim nor reward when published. Increasingly reclusive and despairing, he wrote Pierre (1852), which, intended as a piece of domestic “ladies” fiction, became a parody of that popular genre, Israel Potter (1855), The Confidence-Man (1857), and magazine stories, including “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) and “Benito Cereno” (1855). After 1857 he wrote verse. In 1866 a customs-inspector position finally brought him a secure income. He returned to prose for his last work, the novel Billy Budd, Foretopman, which remained unpublished until 1924. Neglected for much of his career, Melville came to be regarded by modern critics as one of the greatest American writers.
Everybody, of course, knows Moby Dick (and what book could be more American?), but few pay attention to the more bitter Redburn. An indictment, and a funny one at that, the book is soaked in the particular kind of homosexualism that some people look for in MD. Extracted from Jonathan Ned Katz in The Village Voice:
Redburn’s First Voyage is a classic journey of discovery — a youth’s discovery of himself and others as feeling, yearning beings, and his discovery of their society as a place of puritanical suppression, poverty, starvation, and commercial exploitation of a range of emotional and physical desires. Though this novel combines fiction with details of Melville’s first trip as sailor in 1839, my focus here is not on Melville’s life, but on those “dirty” jokes he inserted in his coded text. Melville filled this novel with archaic sexual words, sexual puns, symbols, allusions and other coded references to male-male eroticism.
COLOR
Color-coding these references was one of Melville’s means of speech: red and its variations are used, not only in commonplace ways, but repeatedly as a way of signing the unspeakable male-male eros. A “purple” light hangs outside a high-class gambling den that also seems to serve as a male whore house. An effeminate hairdresser and heartbreaker named “Lavender” wears “claret colored suits” and “red velvet vests.” The skipper of a red-sailed boat, an “old ruby of a fellow,” with a “rubicund” nose, propositions young Redburn. The pale, sickly, redshirted Jackson, vampire-like, studies the “red cheeks” of a handsome, healthy sailor. Another sailor comments on the name “Redburn”: “scorch you to take hold of it.” That name connotes the yearning for intimacy with a male burning within this lonely youth — a subject too hot to handle directly in Victorian America.
In 1915 Dr. Havelock Ellis published the report of an American “invert” who said that the color red symbolized “sexual inversion” in New York City — to wear a red necktie in the street was to invite embarrassing remarks from newsboys.
Melville’s use of red suggests that in the late 1840s, the color connoted to him not just lust in general, but the lust of male for male.
SWEETMEATS
An ominous undercurrent informs one sailor’s hostile response to Redburn’s aristocratic hunting jacket: “Come here, my little boy, has your ma put some sweetmeats for ye to take to sea?” In the mid-nineteenth century, says Eric Partridge, “sweetmeat” was “low” English for the “male member,” as well as a female mistress. This sailor thus metaphorically threatens molestation.
JACK BLUNT
Another sailor on the Highlander, Jack Blunt, has a Dream Book with red covers, which tells how to foretell the future. Without indirection, Redburn reports: this Blunt “had a sad story about a man-of-war’s-man who broke his heart at Portsmouth during the late war, and threw away his life recklessly.” That blunt statement is probably the first in American fiction in which male comes out so directly as lover of male.
Another “incomprehensible” story of Blunt’s is about some “sort of fairy sea-queen;” In the late nineteenth century, says Partridge, “queen” or “quean” was used to refer to “A homosexual, esp. one with girlish manners and carriage.”
Melville’s use of “queen” suggests the word had some such meaning by mid-century. “Fairy” is first known to refer to homosexuals in 1896. But Melville’s use of “fairy” in 1849 hints that that word also referred to an effeminate male by mid-century.
LARRY
Yet another sailor, Larry, a “whaleman,” was “a somewhat singular man . . , with his eyes cast down.” Downcast eyes would, a hundred years later, be called a sure sign of homosexuality; a friend recalls reading in 1955, in a popular magazine of such a symptom.
Larry’s travels as a sailor had familiarized him with the “life of nature,” and he is said to cast “some illiberal insinuations against civilization” — and Christianity. In “Madagasky,” he says, “You don’t see any Methodist chaps feeling dreadful about their souls.” What’s the use of being “snivelized” Larry asks Redburn; “Blast Ameriky, I say. Attacks against “civilization” were associated with several early sodomitical defenses.
HERMAPHRODITE
Every day a new ship docks beside the Highlander: a Glasgow brig, manned by “sober” Scotsmen is “replaced by a jovial French hermaphrodite,” its decks “echoing with song” and “much dancing.” A “hermaphrodite” was a sailing vessel combining the characteristics of two kinds of ships. But that Melville intended another double entendre is clear. “Hermaphrodite” was an old term for an “effeminate man or virile woman,” as well as for a “catamite” (partner of a pederast). Melville’s well-named “hermaphrodite” was “jovial” with song and dance, as male no doubt partnered male in gay abandon.
FRIENDLY BACHELOR
In Liverpool, Redburn recalls, he went on board a “salt-drogher,” one of the small boats with “red sails” which carry cargo to ocean-going ships. This salt-drogher was manned by “a bachelor, who kept house all alone,” and “had an eye to having things cozy around him. It was in the evening; and he invited me down into his sanctum to supper; and there we sat together like a couple in a box at an oyster-celler.”
Privately coupled, like a man and woman on a date, the skipper tells Redburn that “‘ Just before going to bed” he has a nightcap and smoke: “‘but stop, let’s to supper first.'” Redburn consumes a meal and a good quantity of beer with this “old ruby of a fellow,” with a “rubicund” nose. Then, feeling guilty about such oral satisfaction, Redburn moves to leave: “my conscience smote me for thus indulging in the pleasures of the table.”
“Now, don’t go, said he; don’t go, my boy; don’t go out into the damp; take an old Christian’s advice,” laying his hand on my shoulder; . . . if you stay here, you’ll soon be dropping off to a nice little nap.”
“But notwithstanding these inducements, I shook my host’s hand and
departed.”
Still secure in his virtue and innocence, young Redburn survives his first proposition from a male.
HARRY BOLTON
In chapter forty-four of Redburn Melville introduces the equivocal Harry Bolton “To The Favorable Consideration Of The Reader.” Melville primes us to take Bolton favorably!
Young Bolton is said to be “one of those small, but perfectly formed beings, with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons.”
Harry, in other words, is a butterfly. That delicate creature has, I suspect, among sailors especially, long signified a propensity to male-male eroticism. In 1964, on the London subway, I met a sailor who showed me a butterfly tattoo on his arm, by way I now realize, of identifying his proclivities and a come-on. Butterfly was also an American homosexual novel published in 1934.
Harry Bolton’s complexion is described as “brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and womanly; and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.”
But where, narrator Redburn coyly asks his readers, among the depraved docks of Liverpool, did he meet this “courtly youth?” He answers: “Several evenings I had noticed him in our street of boarding houses, standing in the doorways.” What Bolton was doing in those’ dusky doorways is not discussed, but Bolton’s prostitution is hinted at later.
Redburn adds: Bolton’s “beauty, dress, and manner struck me as so out of place in such a street, that I could not possibly divine what had transplanted this delicate exotic” from an aristocratic neighborhood in London to a Liverpool slum. But Redburn “smoothed down the skirts of my jacket, and at once accosted him.” Those “skirts” and that “accosting” suggest a dual sexual role.
Bolton tells Redburn he was an orphan who had lost his small fortune gambling. He had resolved to carve out a fresh fortune” in America, crossing the ocean as a sailor — an attempt, also, to prove himself “manly.” Bolton’s new “scorn of fine coats,” says Redburn, corresponded with his “reckless contempt . . . for all past conventionalities.”
THE MARQUIS
Another of Bolton’s stories, about the Marquis of Bristol offering him a home, begins to breed, even in innocent young Redburn, “some suspicions concerning the rigid morality of my friend, as a teller of truth.” Redburn “cherished toward Harry a heart, loving and true.” But “suspicions” about Bolton’s morals made Redburn “hold back my whole soul from him; when, in its loneliness, it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.”
Poignant regret at this opportunity for intimacy lost due to puritanical strictures summarizes Redburn’s relationship with Bolton.
A “MYSTERIOUS NIGHT”
In order, as Bolton claimed, to recover a “considerable sum” of money, Bolton travels to London, taking Redburn along for a “Mysterious Night.” This is spent at a “semi-public place of opulent entertainment” in the West End — Bolton tells the cab driver “No. 40,” the “high steps there, with the purple light!” The specificity of address, purple light, and other details suggests Melville may have had some actual place in mind.
This den has ceiling frescos in which “Guido’s ever youthful Apollo” appears “in a crimson dawn.” At “Morrish-looking tables . . . sat knots of gentlemanly men, with cut glass decanters and taper-waisted glasses.” Those effeminate glasses are another example of Melville’s endowing inanimate objects with a feminine gender to render ambiguous the masculinity of his human characters. The equivocal masculinity of Donald, the Highlander’s male figurehead was noted earlier.
The den’s “obsequious waiters” are presided over by “a very handsome florid old man,” with whom Bolton disappears for a moment. Redburn then “observed one of the waiters eyeing me a little impertinently, as I thought, and as if he saw something queer about me.”
OLD PAINTINGS
Bolton then led Redburn upstairs to a Persian carpeted room hung with lascivious, “mythological oil-paintings”.
Melville writes: “There were such pictures as the high-priests, for a bribe, showed to Alexander in the innermost shrine of the white temple in the Libyan oasis: such pictures as the pontiff of the sun strove to hide from Cortez, when, sword in hand, he burst open the sanctorum of the pyramid-fane at Cholula: such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated mansion of Pansa, in Pompeii — in that part of it called by Varro the hollow of the house: such pictures as Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius: such pictures as are delineated on the bronze medals, to this day dug up on the ancient island or Capreae: such pictures as you might have beheld in an arched recess, leading from the left hand of the secret side-gallery of the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth.”
William Gilman’s research for his study, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (1951), says that only one of those mythic erotic pictures referred to an actual historical work: Suetonius does mention a picture which Tiberius kept in his bedroom. In a modest back note Gilman says this showed “Atalanta performing a most unnatural service for Meleager.” My own research, with historian John Boswell’s expert help and translation, indicates that the exact act referred to was a “blow-job” (the original old Latin translates literally as “to gratify with the mouth”).
But Melville’s other “mythological oil-paintings” are literally just that — mythological — a literary joke intended to excite reader’s prurient curiosity. The non-existence of those paintings is no failure of scholarship on Melville’s part, as Gilman stuffily says, but are Melville’s means of inciting pedants like Gilman to explore the history of what in 1951 was still called “unnatural” sex.
CARLO AND HIS ORGAN
If Bolton’s background did involve such illicit sexual commerce, he was not the only such emigrant the Highlander carried to America. On the ship, among those traveling to the U.S. says Redburn, was a “rich-cheeked, chestnut-haired Italian boy . . , not above fifteen,” whose pensive eye reflected many sad experiences: “It was not an eye like Harry’s tho’ Harry’s was large and womanly. It shone with a soft spiritual radiance.” The Italian’s head was “heaped with thick clusters of tendril curls,” and “reminded you of a classic vase.” From “the knee downward, the naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady’s arm; so soft and rounded.” This Carlo had no father, and “From the first, Harry took to the boy.” Carlo, it seems, had made a living at music — playing a “hand-organ”:
“But do you not sometimes meet with cross and crabbed old men,” said Harry, “who would rather have your room than your music?”
“Yes, sometimes,” said Carlo, playing with his foot, “sometimes I do.”
“And then, knowing the value of quiet to unquiet men, I suppose you never leave them under a shilling?”
“No,” continued the boy, I love my organ as I do myself, for it is my only friend, poor organ; it sings to me when I am sad, and cheers me; and I never play before a house, on purpose to be paid for leaving off . . . .
Melville’s reference to men wanting Carlo’s “room” rather than his music, Melville’s casual allusion to the blackmail of sodomites (Carlo’s “knowing the [money] value of quiet to unquiet men”), and his pun about Carlo’s “organ,” are such blatant references to illicit sex it is difficult to understand how, in Victorian America, they were not recognized as scandalous.
FOAMING-AT-THE-MOUTH
How such references escaped notice in the 1840s becomes clearer when we consider that such erotic passages are still not officially recognized in the 1980s. While a Melville industry flourishes in academia, and books are written on such arcane subjects as the possible influence of East Indian mysticism on Whitman, one still risks job and violent critical attack by devoting book or thesis to a close textual analysis of lust. (See, for example, Richard Boyer’s foaming-at-the-mouth response to The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry by Robert K. Martin.) Despite the success of Boswell’s tome on Christianity, intolerance, and homosex, and his display of scholarly erudition in dozens of footnotes in dozens of languages — in the American academy of the 1980s, to focus on the details of the erotic, their history and social construction, is still considered risqué and risky.
But Melville’s erotic puns, archaism, and allusions reveal much about Victorian (and our) sexuality; they indicate Melville’s belief that his respectable readers would not discern his outrageous sexual subtext. He assumed proper Victorians had buried the erotic deep in the unconscious or banished it to distant and indistinct spheres of prostitution, sodomy, or sapphism, making safe the sexual secrets of his story.
Continuing about his organ, Carlo says that when people drive him away from their homes
“I do not think my organ is to blame, but they themselves are to blame; for such people’s musical pipes are cracked, and grown rusted, that no more music can be breathed into their souls.”
“No, Carlo; no music like yours, perhaps,” said Harry with a laugh.
Carlo adds: “‘Though my organ is as full of melody, as a hive is of bees; yet no organ can make music in unmusical breasts; no more than my native winds can, when they breathe upon a harp without chords.” Given Melville’s loaded, coded sex text, Carlo’s winds that breathe on that chordless harp maybe refer to oral copulation performed upon an unresponding penis.
HARRY BOLTON AGAIN
On the ship going back to America, Redburn’s mates take an immediate dislike to Harry Bolton, “girlish youth,” whose provocative clothes defiantly emphasize his aristocratic, unmanly tastes. One day, says Redburn, Bolton “came on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch.”
The sailors “took a special spite” at Bolton’s wardrobe: “It was curious to listen to the various hints and opinings thrown out” in response to Bolton’s “silks, velvets, broadclothes, and satin. I do not know exactly what they thought Harry had been” — a gambler it is suggested. Bolton “was put down for “a very equivocal character.” “Equivocal beings” was the phrase Mary Wollstone craft in 1792 applied to those we would now called homosexuals.
Despite Bolton’s “effeminacy of appearance,” says Redburn, he had earlier displayed “flashes of spirit.” Redburn therefore wondered how Bolton “could now yield himself up to the almost passive reception” of the sailors’ contempt. He concluded: “there are passages in the lives of all men” atypical of their more usual ways.
On this trip, says Redburn, “the treatment of the crew threw Harry more and more upon myself for companionship. Bolton “became more communicative concerning his past career,” but “he did not make plain many things . . . I was very curious to know.”
Bolton had no “regular profession,” so sought Redburn’s advice about what to do for a living in America. The “two friendless wanderers” held long talks. Redburn suggested that Bolton try for a clerk’s job since he claimed to write a fine hand. Bolton’s actual hand, Redburn comments, was small, his fingers “long and thin” — it was “the perfumed hand of Petronius Arbiter, that elegant young buck of a Roman who once cut great Seneca dead in the forum.”
PETRONIUS’ SATYRICON
Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, says historian Vern Bullough, “offers the nearest approach to a defense of homosexuality existing in classical Latin literature.” Of the Satyricon historian Otto Kiefer says: “the most startling feature” of this satire on Roman sexual life is “the easy and natural way in which Petronius ranks homosexual love beside the love of women, as if it were neither different nor inferior. Encolpius, the narrator of the whole story, is himself a homosexual.” So is his friend Ascyltus, and their mutual lover, the boy Giton, as well as Trimalchio, “the most popular character in the novel.”
Redburn continues: though Bolton’s “hand was lady-like looking, and had once been white as the queen’s cambric hankerchief,” his work as a sailor “subtracted from its original daintiness.” Looking at his work-stained hand Bolton asked himself: “Is this the hand I kissed to the divine Georgiana?” Was this the hand which “ratified my bond to Lord Lovely?” That bond to Lovely, ratified by hand, evokes the slang phrase , hand-gig,” dating to the 193Os, referring to “A type of male prostitute who will masturbate his clients.”
Again, these are just some of Katz’s insinuations (and I suspect that Katz needs to read more and read into less, but that is at least consistent with his publication and his era), and many of them fall far short of convincing. But he did hit on something with Harry Bolton. As Elizabeth Hardwick, inimitable critic and Melville lover, had it:
In Redburn, the boat is in the Liverpool harbor and the crew is free to roam the city, and Melville is free to have his young hero meet the intriguing person named Harry Bolton. Bolton is lifelike as a certain type of frenzied, melodramatic young homosexual down on his luck and as such he is as embarrassing and interesting as life itself. Redburn, that is, Melville at his desk, is both accepting and suspicious of Harry, but there is everything about the encounter as told that seems to reveal either a striking innocence of heart and mind or a defiance in offering the scenes to the public. Nothing in the early parts of the novel would lead us to anticipate the extravagant, interesting, sudden dive into a richly decorated underworld.
The two meet on the streets of Liverpool and Redburn is immediately attracted. Harry is not a dumb, deadened fish in the human pool of the seamen; he is a friendly stranger, an English youth, fluent in self-creation. It is difficult to imagine how this handsome youth with the perfectly formed legs and so on, this “delicate exotic from the conservatories of some Regent-street,” came to the “potato-patches of Liverpool.” In a bar, Harry will be chatting about the possibility of going to America and thus the friendship with this “incontrovertible son of a gentleman” begins. Harry will tell his story: born in the old city of Bury St. Edmunds, orphaned, but heir to a fortune of five thousand pounds. Off to the city, where with gambling sportsmen and dandies his fortune is lost to the last sovereign.
More elaboration from the new friend: embarked for Bombay as a midshipman in the East India service, claimed to have handled the masts, and was taken on board Redburn’s ship which was not due to leave for a few days. Together in the roadside inns, every fascination—more news about the companion and his friendship with the Marquis of Waterford and Lady Georgiana Theresa, “the noble daughter of an anonymous earl.”
Harry is stone-broke one moment, but darts away and will return with money which will provide for an astonishing trip to London. (There is no record of a trip from Liverpool to London during this early journey in 1839 nor by the time the book was published in 1849 when Melville sailed to London for the first time almost two weeks after the publication of Redburn.) When they alight in the city, Harry puts on a mustache and whiskers as a “precaution against being recognized by his own particular friends in London.” A feverish atmosphere of hysteria and panic falls upon poor Harry and is part of the chiaroscuro mastery with which his character and the club scene that follows are so brilliantly rendered. And fearlessly rendered in sexual images of decadence and privilege in an astonishing embrace.
The club is a “semi-public place of opulent entertainment” described in a mixture of subterranean images—Paris catacombs—and faux Farnese Palace decorations. In the first room entered, there is a fresco ceiling of elaborate detail. Under the gas lights it seems to the bewildered gaze of Redburn to have the glow of the “moon-lit garden of Portia at Belmont; and the gentle lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, lurked somewhere among the vines.” There are obsequious waiters dashing about, under the direction of an old man “with snow-white hair and whiskers, and in a snow-white jacket—he looked like an almond tree in blossom….” In a conventional club manner, there are knots of gentlemen “with cut decanters and taper-waisted glasses, journals and cigars, before them.”
Redburn, throughout the scene, is curious and alarmed by Harry’s way of leaving him standing alone in this unaccountable atmosphere. They proceed to a more private room; so thick are the Persian carpets he feels he is sinking into “some reluctant, sedgy sea.” Oriental ottomans “wrought into plaited serpents” and pornographic pictures “Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius.” A bust of an old man with a “mysteriously- wicked expression, and imposing silence by one thin finger over his lips. His marble mouth seemed tremulous with secrets.”
Harry in a frantic return to private business suddenly puts a letter into Redburn’s hand, which he is to post if Harry does not return by morning. And off he goes, but not before introducing Redburn to the attendant as young Lord Stormont. For the now terrified American, penniless son of a senator and so on, the place seemed “infected” as if “some eastern plague had been imported.” The door will partly open and there will be a “tall, frantic man, with clenched hands, wildly darting through the passage, toward the stairs.” On Redburn goes in images of fear and revulsion. “All the mirrors and marbles around me seemed crawling over with lizards; and I thought to myself, that though gilded and golden, the serpent of vice is a serpent still.” The macabre excursion with its slithering images passes as in a tormented dream and Harry returns to say, “I am off for America; the game is up.”
The relation between the two resumes its boyish pleasantries. Back on ship, Harry, in full maquillage, comes on deck in a “brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap to stand his morning watch.” When ordered to climb the rigging, he falls into a faint and it becomes clear that his account of shipping to Bombay was another handy fabrication. Nevertheless, Redburn remains faithful in friendship, and they land in New York. The chapter heading is: “Redburn and Harry, Arm and Arm, in Harbor.” Redburn shows him around, introduces him to a friend in the hope of finding work, and then leaves him as he must, since he could hardly take the swain back to Lansingburgh. Years later he will learn that Harry Bolton had signed on another ship and fallen or jumped overboard.
In the novel there is another encounter, this of lyrical enthusiasm untainted by the infested London underworld. It is Carlo, “with thick clusters of tendril curls, half overhanging the brows and delicate ears.” His “naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady’s arm, so soft and rounded, with infantile ease and grace.” He goes through life playing his hand organ in the streets for coins. Now, on the deck, Redburn sinks into a paroxysm of joy at the sound of the “humble” music:
Play on, play on, Italian boy!… Turn hither your pensive, morning eyes…let me gaze fathoms down into thy fathomless eye…. All this could Carlo do—make, unmake me;…and join me limb to limb…. And Carlo! ill betide the voice that ever greets thee, my Italian boy, with aught but kindness; cursed the slave who ever drives thy wondrous box of sights and sounds forth from a lordling’s door!
The scenes with Harry Bolton were not much admired; as an “intrusion,” contemporary critics seemed to rebuke them for structural defects rather than for the efflorescent adjectives, the swooning intimacy of feeling for male beauty of a classical androgynous perfection that will reach its transcendence in the innocent loveliness of Billy Budd, his heartbreaking death-bed vision.
Hershel Parker, the encyclopedic biographer and tireless Melville scholar, finds no charm in the “flaccid” Harry Bolton and has interesting thoughts on why Melville was so clearly dismissive of Redburn, a work of enduring interest.
“What he thought he was doing in it, as a young married man and a new father, is an unanswered question.” And: “…Only a young and still naive man could have thought that he could write a kind of psychological autobiography…without suffering any consequences.” Parker suggests that Melville came to understand the folly of what he had written, came to acknowledge that he had revealed homosexual longings or even homosexual experience.
Parker provides another item in the atmosphere that surrounded the days and nights of the writer. At the time, there sprang up in America a group called the Come-Outers, a sect wishing to follow Paul’s exhortation in II Corinthians 6:17: “Wherefore come out from them, and be ye separate.” It was the object of the group to reveal information ordinarily held private. Parker’s research seems to indicate that Melville knew about the sect, but did not notice that he had “unwittingly joined the psychological equivalent of this new American religious sect; in mythological terms, he had opened Pandora’s box when he thought he was merely describing the lid.”
It is not clear whether the Come-Outers were, as in the present use of the term, to announce themselves as homosexual when such revelations were relevant. In the biblical text, Paul seems to be referring to Corinthians who were worshiping idols or pretending to virtues they did not practice, such as sorrow while rejoicing, pretending poverty while piling up riches.
However, if Melville rejected Redburn because he came to see it as an embarrassing and unworthy self-revelation, why did he open the pages of the subsequent Moby-Dick with the tender, loving union of Queequeg and Ishmael, a charming, unprecedented Mann und Weib? Another wonder about life and art: Where did Melville come upon the ornate and lascivious men’s club he described with feral acuteness in Redburn? There is no record found in the cinder and ashes of Melville’s jottings to bring the night journey into history. But does the blank forever erase the possibility that the extraordinary diversion actually took place? Harder to credit that Melville, in his imagination or from what is sometimes called his use and abuse of sources, was altogether free of the lush, disorienting opening of the door.
Better writing, and better reading too. Hardwick indeed gives us the best read of Melville, something that helped me love him despite what everybody says about him. She did so by drawing attention to a peculiar little short story. From Bartleby the Scrivener:
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate diverse histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.
…
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically
…
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”
“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it towards him.
“I would prefer not to,” said he.
…
I closed the doors, and again advanced towards Bartleby. I felt additional incentives tempting me to my fate. I burned to be rebelled against again. I remembered that Bartleby never left the office.
“Bartleby,” said I, “Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, won’t you? (it was but a three minute walk,) and see if there is any thing for me.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“You will not?”
“I prefer not.”
I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?—my hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?
“Bartleby!”
No answer.
“Bartleby,” in a louder tone.
No answer.
“Bartleby,” I roared.
Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage.
“Go to the next room, and tell Nippers to come to me.”
“I prefer not to,” he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.
“Very good, Bartleby,” said I, in a quiet sort of serenely severe self-possessed tone, intimating the unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very close at hand. At the moment I half intended something of the kind. But upon the whole, as it was drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best to put on my hat and walk home for the day, suffering much from perplexity and distress of mind.
And now the true masterpiece, Hardwick’s Bartleby in Manhattan, regrettably clipped:
Out of some sixteen thousand words, Bartleby, the cadaverous and yet blazing center of all our attention, speaks only thirty-seven short lines, more than a third of which are a repetition of a single line, the celebrated, the “famous,” I think one might call it, retort: I would prefer not to. No, “retort” will not do, representing as it does too great a degree of active mutuality for Bartleby—reply perhaps.
Bartleby’s reduction of language is of an expressiveness literally limitless. Few characters in fiction, if indeed any exist, have been able to say all they wish in so striking, so nearly speechless a manner. The work is, of course, a sort of fable of inanition, and returning to it, as I did, mindful of the old stone historical downtown and the new, insatiable necropolis of steel and glass, lying on the vegetation of the participial declining this and that, I found it possible to wish that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was just itself, a masterpiece without the challenge of its setting, Wall Street. Still the setting does not flee the mind, even if it does not quite bind itself either, the way unloaded furniture seems immediately bound to its doors and floors.
Melville has written his story in a cheerful, confident, rather optimistic, Dickensian manner. Or at least that is the manner in which it begins. In the law office, for instance, the copyists are introduced with their Dickensian tics and their tic-names: Nipper, Turkey, and Ginger-nut. An atmosphere of comedy, of small, amusing, busy particulars, surrounds Bartleby and his large, unofficial (not suited to an office) articulations, which are nevertheless clerkly and even, perhaps, clerical.
The narrator, a mild man of the law with a mild Wall Street business, is a “rather elderly man,” as he says of himself at the time of putting down his remembrances of Bartleby. On the edge of retirement, the lawyer begins to think about that “singular set of men,” the law-copyists or scriveners he has known in his thirty years of practice. He notes that he has seen nothing of these men in print and, were it not for the dominating memory of Bartleby, he might have told lighthearted professional anecdotes, something perhaps like the anecdotes of servants come and gone, such as we find in the letters of Jane Carlyle, girls from the country who are not always unlike the Turkeys, Nippers, and Ginger-nuts.
The lawyer understands that no biography of Bartleby is possible because “the materials do not exist,” and indeed the work is not a character sketch and not a section of a “life,” even though it ends in death. Yet the device of memory is not quite the way it works out, because each of Bartleby’s thirty-seven lines, with their riveting variations, so slight as to be almost painful to the mind taking note of them, must be produced at the right pace and accompanied by the requests that occasion them. At a certain point, Bartleby must “gently disappear behind the screen,” which, in a way, is a present rather than a past. In the end, Melville’s structure is magical because the lawyer creates Bartleby by allowing him to be, a decision of nicely unprofessional impracticality. The competent, but scarcely strenuous, office allows Bartleby, although truly the allowance arises out of the fact that the lawyer is a far better man than he knows himself to be. And he is taken by surprise to learn of his tireless curiosity about the incurious ghost, Bartleby.
The lawyer has a “snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds,” rather than the more dramatic actions before juries (a choice that would not be defining today). He has his public sinecures and when they are officially abolished he feels a bit of chagrin, but no vehemence. He recognizes the little vanities he has accumulated along the way, one of which is that he has done business with John Jacob Astor. And he likes to utter the name “for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it and rings like unto bullion.” These are the thoughts of a man touched by the comic spirit, the one who will be touched for the first time in his life, and by way of his dealings with Bartleby, by “overpowering, stinging melancholy…a fraternal melancholy.”
A flurry of copying demand had led the lawyer to run an advertisement which brought to his door a young man, Bartleby, a person sedate, “pallidly neat, politely respectable.” Bartleby is taken on and placed at a desk which “originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which owing to subsequent erection, commanded at present no view at all.”
This is a suitable place for Bartleby, who does not require views of the outside world and who has no “views” of the other kind, that is, no opinions beyond his adamantine assertion of his own feelings, if feelings they are; he has, as soon becomes clear, his hard pebbles of response with their sumptuous, taciturn resonance.
Bartleby begins to copy without pause, as if “long famishing for something to copy.” This is observed by the lawyer who also observes that he feels no pleasure in it since it is done “silently, palely, mechanically.” On the third day of employment, Bartleby appears, the genuine Bartleby, the one who gives utterance. His first utterance is like the soul escaping from the body, as in medieval drawings.
The tedious proofreading of the clerk’s copy is for accuracy done in collaboration with another person, and it is the lawyer himself who calls out to Bartleby for assistance in the task. The laconic, implacable signature is at hand, the mysterious signature that cannot be interpreted and cannot be misunderstood. Bartleby replies, I would prefer not to.
The pretense of disbelief provides the occasion for I would prefer not to soon to be repeated three times and “with no uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence.” By the singularity of the refusal, the absence of “because” or of the opening up of some possibly alternating circumstance, this negative domination seizes the story like a sudden ambush in the streets.
Bartleby’s “I” is of such a completeness that it does not require support. He possesses his “I” as if it were a visible part of the body, the way ordinary men possess a thumb. In his sentence he encloses his past, present, and future, himself, all there is. His statement is positive indeed and the not is less important than the “I,” because the “not” refers to the presence of others, to the world, inevitably making suggestions the “I” does not encompass.
Bartleby would prefer not to read proof with his employer, a little later he would prefer not to examine his own quadruplicate copyings with the help of the other clerks, he would prefer not to answer or to consider that this communal proofreading is labor-saving and customary. About his “mulish vagary”—no answer.
As we read the story we are certain that, insofar as Bartleby himself is concerned, there is nothing to be thought of as “interesting” in his statement. There is no coquetry; it is merely candid, final, inflexible. Above all it is not “personal”; that is, his objection is not to the collaborators themselves and not to the activity of proofreading, indeed no more repetitive than daylong copying. The reply is not personal and it is not invested with “personality.” And this the kind and now violently curious and enduring lawyer cannot believe. He will struggle throughout the tale to fill up the hole, to wonder greatly, to prod as he can, in search of “personality.” And the hole, the chasm, or better the “cistern,” one of the lawyer’s words for the view outside Bartleby’s desk, will not be filled.
What began as a comedy, a bit of genre actually, ends as tragedy. But like Bartleby himself it is difficult for the reader to supply adjectives. Is Bartleby mysterious; is his nature dark, angular, subterranean? You are deterred by Bartleby’s mastery from competing with him by your command of the adjective. He is overwhelmingly affecting to the emotions of the lawyer and the reader, but there is no hint that he is occupied with lack, disuse, failure, inadequacy. If one tries to imagine Bartleby alone, without the office, what is to be imagined? True, he is always alone, in an utter loneliness that pierces the lawyer’s heart when he soon finds that Bartleby has no home at all but is living in the office at night.
(No home, living in the office day and night. Here, having exempted this story from my study of Manhattanism because of its inspired occupation with an ultimate condition and its stepping aside from the garbage and shards of Manhattan history, I was stopped by this turn in the exposition. Yes, the undomesticity of a great city like New York, undomestic in the ways other cities are not—then, and still now. Bartleby, the extreme, the icon of the extreme, is not exactly living in the office. Instead he just does not leave it at the end of the day. But it is very easy to imagine from history where the clerks, Nipper and Turkey, are of an evening. They are living in lodging houses, where half of New York’s population lived as late as 1841: newlyweds, families, single persons. Whitman did a lot of “boarding round,” as he called it, and observed, without rebuke, or mostly without rebuke, that the boarding house led the unfamilied men to rush out after dinner to the saloon or brothel, away from the unprivate private, to the streets which are the spirit of the city, which are the lively blackmail that makes city citizens abide.
Lodgings then, and later the “divided space” of the apartment house, both expressing Manhattanism as a life lived in transition. And lived in a space that is not biography, but is to be fluent and changeable, an escape from the hometown and the homestead, an escape from the given. The rotting tenements of today are only metaphysical apartments and in deterioration take on the burdensome aspect of “homes” because they remind, in the absence of purchased maintenance, that something “homelike” may be asked of oneself and at the same time denied by the devastations coming from above, below, and next door. Manhattan, the release from the home, which is the leaking roof, the flooded basement, the garbage, and, most of all the grounds, that is, surrounding nature. “After I learned about electricity I lost interest in nature. Not up-to-date enough.” Mayakovsky, the poet of urbanism.
So Bartleby is found to be living in the office day and night. But Bartleby is not a true creature of Manhattan because he shuns the streets and is unmoved by the moral, religious, acute, obsessive, beautiful ideal of Consumption. Consumption is what one leaves one’s “divided space” to honor, as the Muslim stops in his standing and moving to say his prayers five times a day, or is it six? But Bartleby eats only ginger-nuts and is starving himself to death. In that way he passes across one’s mind like a feather, calling forth the vague Hinduism of Thoreau and the outer-world meditations of Emerson. Thoreau, who disliked the city, any city, thought deeply about it, so deeply that in Walden he composed the city’s most startling consummations, one of which is: “Of a life of luxury, the fruit is luxury.”)
To return, what is Bartleby “thinking” about when he is alone? It is part of the perfect completeness of his presentation of himself, although he does not present himself, that one would be foolhardy to give him thoughts. They would dishonor him. So, Bartleby is not “thinking” or experiencing or longing or remembering. All one can say is that he is a master of language, of the perfect expressiveness. This is shown when the lawyer tries to revise him.
On an occasion, the lawyer asks Bartleby to go on an errand to the post office. Bartleby replies that he would prefer not to. The lawyer, seeing a possibility for an entropic, involuntary movement in this mastery of meaning, proposes an italicized emendation. He is answered with an italicized insistence.
“You will not?”
“I prefer not.”
What is the difference between will not and prefer not? There is no difference insofar as Bartleby’s actions will be altered, but he seems to be pointing out by the italics that his preference is not under the rule of the conditional or the future tense. He does not mean to say that he prefers not, but will if he must, or if it is wished. His “I” that prefers not, will not. I do not think he has chosen the verb “prefer” in some emblematic way. That is his language and his language is what he is.
Prefer has its power, however. The nipping clerks who have been muttering that they would like to “black his eyes” or “kick him out of the office,” begin, without sarcasm or mimicry, involuntarily, as it were, to say to the lawyer, “If you would prefer, Sir,” and so on.
Bartleby’s language reveals the all of him, but what is revealed? Character? Bartleby is not a character in the manner of the usual, imaginative, fictional construction. And he is not a character as we know them in life, with their bundling bustle of details, their suits and ties and felt hats, their love affairs surreptitious or binding, family albums, psychological justifications dragging like a little wagon along the highway of experience. We might say he is a destiny, without interruptions, revisions, second chances. But what is a destiny that is not endured by a “character”? Bartleby has no plot in his present existence, and we would not wish to imagine subplots for his already lived years. He is indeed only words, wonderful words, and very few of them. One might for a moment sink into the abyss and imagine that instead of prefer not he had said, “I don’t want to” or “I don’t feel like it.” No, it is unthinkable, a vulgarization, adding truculence, idleness, foolishness, adding indeed “character” and altering a sublimity of definition.
Bartleby, the scrivener, “standing at the dead-wall window” announces that he will do no more copying. No more. The lawyer, marooned in the law of cause and effect, notices the appearance of eyestrain and that there is a possibility Bartleby is going blind. This is never clearly established—Melville’s genius would not want at any part of the story to enter the region of sure reason and causality.
In the midst of these peculiar colloquies, the lawyer asks Bartleby if he cannot indeed be a little reasonable here and there.
“‘At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ was his mildly cadaverous reply.”
There is no imagining what the sudden intrusion of “at present” may signify and it seems to be just an appendage to the “I,” without calling up the nonpresent, the future. From the moment of first refusal it had passed through the lawyer’s mind that he might calmly and without resentment dismiss Bartleby, but he cannot, not even after “no more copying.” He thinks: “I should have as soon thought of turning my pale, plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero outdoors.” Ah. The “wondrous ascendancy” perhaps begins at that point, with the notion that Bartleby is a representation of a life, a visage, but not the life itself.
The lawyer, overcome by pity, by troubling thoughts of human diversity, by self-analysis, goes so far as to take down from the shelf certain theological works which give him the idea that he is predestined to “have Bartleby.” But as a cheerful, merely social visitor to Trinity Church, this idea does not last and indeed is too abstract because the lawyer has slowly been moving into a therapeutic role, a role in which he persists in the notion of “personality” that may be modified by patience, by suggestion, by reason.
Still, at last, it is clear that Bartleby must go, must be offered a generous bonus, every sort of accommodation and good wish. This done, the lawyer leaves in a pleasant agitation of mind, thinking of the laws of chance represented by his overhearing some betting going on in the street. Will Bartleby be there in the morning or will he at last be gone? Of course, he has remained and the offered money has not been picked up.
“Will you not quit me?”
“I would prefer not to quit you.”
The “quitting” is to be accomplished by the lawyer’s decision to “quit” himself, that is, to quit his offices for larger quarters. A new tenant is found, the boxes are packed and sent off, and Bartleby is bid goodbye. But no, the new tenants, who are not therapists, rush around to complain that he is still there and that he is not a part of their lease. They turn him out of the offices.
The lawyer goes back to the building and finds Bartleby still present, that is, sitting on the banister of the stairway in the entrance hallway.
“What are you doing here, Bartleby?”
“Sitting on the banister.”
The lawyer had meant to ask what will you do with your life, where will you go, and not, where is your body at this moment. But with Bartleby body and statement are one. Indeed the bewitching qualities, the concentrated seriousness, the genius of Bartleby’s “dialogue” had long ago affected the style of the lawyer, but in the opposite direction, that is, to metaphor, arrived at by feeling. His head is full of images about the clerk and he thinks of him as “the column of a ruined temple” and “a bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic.” And from these metaphors there can be no severance.
There with Bartleby sitting on the banister for life, as it were, the lawyer soars into the kindest of deliriums. The therapeutic wish, the beating of the wings of angels above the heads of the harassed and affectionate, unhinges his sense of the possible, the suitable, the imaginable. He begins to think of new occupations for Bartleby and it is so like the frenzied and loving moments in family life: would the pudgy, homely daughter like to comb her hair, neaten up a bit, and apply for a position as a model?—and why not, others have, and so on and so on.
The angel wings tremble and the lawyer says: “Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?”
Bartleby, the unimaginable promoter of goods for sale, replies with his rapid deliberation. Slow deliberation is not necessary for one who knows the interior of his mind, as if that mind were the interior of a small, square box containing a single pair of cuff links.
To the idea of clerking in a store Bartleby at last appends a reason, one indeed of great opacity.
“There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”
Agitated rebuttal of “too much confinement” for one who keeps himself “confined all the time”!
Now, in gentle, coaxing hysteria, the lawyer wonders if the bartender’s business would suit Bartleby and adds that “there is no trying of the eyes in that.”
No, Bartleby would not like that at all, even though he repeats that he is not particular.
Would Bartleby like to go about collecting bills for merchants? It would take him outdoors and be good for his health. The answer: “No, I would prefer to be doing something else.”
Doing something else? That is, sitting on the banister, rather than selling dry goods, bartending, and bill collecting.
Here the lawyer seems to experience a sudden blindness, the blindness of a bright light from an oncoming car on a dark road. The bright light is the terrible clarity of Bartleby.
So, in a blind panic: “How then would be going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation—how would that suit you?”
“Not at all. It does not strike me that there is anything definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular.”
Definite? Conversation is not definite owing to its details of style, opinion, observation, humor, pause, and resumption; and it would not be at all pleasing to Bartleby’s mathematical candor. Bartleby is definite; conversation is not. He has said it all.
But I am not particular? This slight addition has entered Bartleby at the moment the lawyer opens his fantastical employment agency. The phrase wishes to extend the lawyer’s knowledge of his client, Bartleby, and to keep him from the tedium of error. Bartleby himself is particular, in that he is indeed a thing distinguished from another. But he is not particular in being fastidious, choosey. He would like the lawyer to understand that he is not concerned with the congenial. It is not quality he asserts; it is essence, essence beyond detail.
The new tenants have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and sent to the Tombs. The same idea had previously occurred to the lawyer in a moment of despair, but he could not see that the immobile, unbegging Bartleby could logically be declared a vagrant. “What! He a vagrant, a wanderer that refuses to budge?”
No matter, the lawyer cannot surrender this “case,” this recalcitrant object of social service, this demand made upon his heart to provide benefit, this being now in an institution, the Tombs, but not yet locked away from the salvaging sentiments of one who remembers. A prison visit is made and in his ineffable therapeutic endurance the lawyer insists there is no reason to despair, the charge is not a disgrace, and even in prison one may sometimes see the sky and a patch of green.
Bartleby, with the final sigh of one who would instruct the uninstructable, says: I know where I am.
In a last urging, on his knees as it were, the lawyer desires to purchase extra food to add to the prison fare.
Bartleby: “I would prefer not to dine today. It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners.” And thus he dies.
*
p.s. Hey. Today the blog is highly pleasured to be the situation for a guest-post by the distinguished local Uday. Even if you haven’t read Melville’s novel ‘Bartleby’, it’s a really fascinating and enlightening read. It’s also an eye-and-brainful, so if you can’t read the entirety today, just do your best and book the post for later. It’s super worth it. Thank you so much, Uday, for making this place your and your thoughts’ home. ** James, Ho! As in Santa Claus. Wow, I managed to make a family-friendly post. How about that! Thanks for your kind and generous attention. Greetings from deep within the small rectangular screen of your phone. Saucy: you and the ever gayer fella. Somehow the band’s name does not lend itself to being snipped into a badge of honor. Strange though. I have heard people use the term Pollardian. In fact, I have used it quite a number of times. The Pollardians? Maybe. I’ll try it out. ‘Crash’ is good. Although you could easily find it wanting, you being you. Good morning! ** Misanthrope, I trust your okayness has persisted. Arguments have been made that discipline and hence work is the cure all. George, you can easily imagine what I think about the sick, stupid, greedy directives coming from the top of the USA these days, your situation very included. Fuck the fucking fuck them. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Of those? Hm, maybe that hotel that looks like a gigantic geode? You? Alice Cooper! Whoop! Oh, big grey mother, I love you forever, With your barbed wire pussy and your good and bad weather, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ooh, bitch! The Tate just had a big Mike Kelley retrospective, so they should be cut at least that much slack, I reckon. ** Bill, Yes, truth be told, I don’t think I’d want to sleep in any of those. Now, Hotel Poseidon on the other hand. Based only on the description, mind you. I will at least check in with my eyes and ears. Thank you. ** Sypha, I too love staying in hotels. Often when I’m walking around in Paris I’ll suddenly wish I was a billionaire and could just go check into the Ritz or some other mega-expensive wherever for a night just for kicks. The last time I was in Japan I ended up in this town called Kaga and stepped off the train and looked up and saw this. Whoa. ** Steeqhen, Choosing the hamster and prison hotels no doubt says a lot about you, but I don’t know what. The Irish Kardashians, perish the thought. Yikes. Given your recent rants, you on controversial outfits should be quite entertaining. The photo shoot sounds quite exciting. You’re on the veritable roll. ** Midnight_Mass_Matt, Hi! Sorry about the blog’s persnicketiness. I don’t know what its problem is. R-G’s wife Catherine is a pal of mine. She’s wild. I’d forgotten that you originally published ‘Hunchback ‘88’. What a great book. Wow, amazing line up of books you have coming. I’ll stay peeled and trigger fingered. Respect! And thanks about my gig with Derek. Yeah, it was strangely really great in person even. For Derek and me, at least. Thanks! Excellent remaining week to you! ** Tyler Ookami, Hm, he sounds quite mercurial. I hope he’s the genius kind. Thanks for the YouTube channel. I eat that stuff up, so … thanks! Everyone, Tyler Ookami announces that there’s a Youtube channel that reviews theme hotels! And he even told us where it is! Here! The Ginger Snaps movies are swell. I think I’ve had them in a couple of posts here at some point. Agreed with you, obviously, about animatronic creatures vs. cg ones. You’ve probingly seen one of my yearly Halloween posts of my favorite animated props of the year. The drag variety show sounds unusually throwing one for a loop-like and exciting. ** Steve, Nothing too wild or extreme, hotel-wise. Efteling has a wacky theme hotel, I stayed there. Phantasialand has a steam punk hotel with glorified capsule rooms, I stayed there. The Madonna Inn. Nothing too exorbitant. Sorry about the necessary parents visit. Being a blood offspring is such a mixed bag. I kind of figured on that box set and saved my money. Good to know. ** HaRpEr, Cool, I’ll look for that Walser book. ‘Artists who revel in confusion/instability’: that definitely corrals most if not all of the writers I most love. I have a close friend here who is transitioning and the last time I saw him his voice was a register lower but other precisely the same and it sounded so right. I only know your voice from the film/video, but I like it, and you speaking/reading was ace, so I wouldn’t worry about the event. How was it? ** Justin D, Hello, Justin! Thanks so much about the interview and stills. I’m so excited that people are finally going to get to see the film starting very soon. No, I can tell right away about the allergy. All kinds of stores these days sell what they tag as ‘organic’ clothes, but a lot of time they’re not. I can just lay the palm of my hand on them and within ten seconds I start to get a tingling in my arm if it’s not actually organic. It’s a drag, but I’ve had the allergy since 1991, so I’m pretty accustomed to it. Thanks about the screening. I’m looking forward to it. We haven’t been present for a ‘PGL’ screening in quite a while. In fact I need to rewatch it today to make sure I remember it fully. I’m saving ‘The Brutalist’ for a long, tedious in-flight viewing if ever. ** jay, I agree. I love staying in hotels. Even rudimentary Motel 6 places. It’s weird. It doesn’t make sense, but it somehow does. It is interestingly nice when the only thing that differentiates a hotel room is what’s in the window. If I’m writing an interview, I’m like you, but I’m from LA, and when I talk I just open my mouth and let it extrude. I’ll check that link when I’m outta here, but I did peek long enough to know I’m kind of already in love with what’s at the other end, so thank you, pal. I hope today is your oyster. Such a strange saying. I wonder what it meant when someone initiated it. ** Dan Carroll, Hey! I enjoyed your essay a lot! So sharp and imaginative. It was beautiful. You’re so good. No, I didn’t know Phil Solomon’s work when I wrote ‘God Jr.’. It was influenced just by the games I was playing and most fascinated by. ‘Banjo Kazoo’ being the main one. But that you thought it was Solomon-eque is a real compliment, thank you. You as a scoutmaster, nice. I was in Boy Scouts. I actually had vague ideas of graduating to the Eagle rank, but I got kicked out because I refused to cut my long hair. No loss, ultimately. ** Right. Please pursue Uday’s thoughtful thoughts today, and I will see you tomorrow.
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