‘We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.‘ — Henry Green
‘I went to a reading the other night; the opening readers (and performers, it was that sort of event) were terrible, so I left at an intermission to have dinner with the people I’d come to the reading to see. After dinner, I got on the uptown train to go home; I was reading this book, an omnibus edition of Nothing, Doting, and Blindness. The woman across from me was looking at me strangely, and I may have been looking at her strangely because she looked like one of the people who had been reading that I’d been introduced to in passing; she reached in her bag and pulled out the Dalkey Archive edition of Nothing, and we had a conversation about how fantastic Henry Green is and what a shame it is that nobody seems to read him. She got off at the next stop after we re-introduced ourselves; this saved me the embarrassment of having to explain that I hadn’t actually seen her read, though she was the only one in the line-up that I’d been half interested in hearing. I have been reading books in the trains of New York for a long time, but this is the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, as far as I can remember. Maybe I’m reading the wrong books.
‘Henry Green is fantastic, of course, even if one isn’t making conversation on trains. I tore through Living, Loving, and Party Going last November while in Mexico, read Blindness, in this volume, on the flight home from Christmas, and Pack My Bag somewhere in between; all the rest save Caught, which is out of print and expensive, are on the shelves waiting to be read. Nothing has taken a little while to get back to: I was reading too fast, I thought, and I needed to slow down. Henry Green seems a bit imposing, I think: like Ronald Firbank, this novel is almost entirely dialogue, and if you’re not reading carefully, a great deal can get lost. Once you’re in, though, it’s hard not to be swept along.
‘The title is from Shakespeare, of course; Much Ado about Nothing with its pairs of starcrossed lovers is an obvious model for the book. Philip and Mary want to get married; their widowed parents, Jane and John, respectively, were once lovers and are still friends. Dick and Liz are Jane and John’s current lovers, though they’re of little consequence, as are, for what that’s worth Philip and Mary. When it’s followed in this volume by Doting, the title suggests the word’s Elizabethan pronunciation, “noting”; as in the play, there’s a great deal of crossed communication. Here Philip discusses wanting to call off his marriage with his mother:
‘All right my dear,’ she said, ‘But you seem very touchy about this. She’s a nice girl I agree yet I also know she’s not nearly good enough for you. What are we to do about it, that is the question?’
‘To be or not to be Mamma.’
‘Philip don’t dramatize yourself for heaven’s sake. This is no time for Richard II. You just can’t go into marriage in such a frame of mind. Let me simply think!’
‘Philip’s response, though he probably doesn’t realize it, is loaded; though the question isn’t “to be or not to be Mamma” but whether his actual father isn’t John, the father of his fiancée, as has been hinted by others. The threat of incest hovers over the book: two-thirds of the way through the book Mary asks her father point-blank if Philip and she are really half-brother and sister, which he strenuously denies. The perceptive reader, however, will have noted that if John is Philip’s father, it’s still entirely possible that John might not be the half-sister of Mary if she is as illegitimate as he is.
‘As in Much Ado about Nothing, this is a comedy, though there’s a darkness behind it. The subject matter is nothing if not slight; the joy of the book is how perfectly it’s accomplished. The book is almost entirely structured in scenes of dialogue between two characters: they are substituted in and out. The primary exception is the novel’s central scene, a party that Jane has thrown ostensibly for Philip’s twenty-first birthday but actually for herself. Philip and Mary attempt to upstage the action by declaring their engagement, but are deeply disappointed when nobody seems to care as much as they had hoped. This interchange between the two of them is at the center of the novel:
‘I say,’ he said, ‘you do feel better now, you must?’
‘I think so, yes,’
‘Can’t find out yes or no.’
‘But no one can. First something inside says everything is fine,’ she wailed, ‘and the next moment it tells you that something which overshadows everything else is very bad just like an avalanche!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I truly am.’
They danced again and again until, as the long night went on they had got into a state of unthinking happiness perhaps.
‘The way the punctuation is deployed for emotional balance here bears note: in particular, that dangling “perhaps” which doesn’t get a comma and pulls down everything that’s come before it. Mary and Philip aren’t the center of the novel, of course; this is a book about their parents, and Philip comes off as a mooncalf. This is a book about middle age: Mary and Philip are too young to realize what’s going on around them. The reader’s affections lie with John and Jane. In the end, the adults have re-paired, but it’s unclear what will happen to Mary and Philip; they’ll be fine, one suspects.
‘Edmund White says in his recent memoir that Nothing is the book he’s read the most times. It’s a book that would lend itself to re-reading; the cyclical motion of characters from one scene to the next suggests it. And one wants to inhabit the world of the book, even though if you don’t particularly care about the social manners of the upper class in post-WWII Britain; it’s like Proust, in that regard. But this is also a book that’s tremendously funny: for me it trumps Waugh.’ — dbv
Henry Green’s house
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Context
Birmingham, UK in the 1920s
Birmingham, UK in 1935
Birmingham, UK in 1964
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Further
‘Molten Treasure: The Books of Henry Green’ (1949) @ Time Magazine
‘Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green’
‘Caught in the Web: Henry Green’ @The Guardian
‘PUSHING THE DAGGER OF PERCEPTION THROUGH THE DRAPES OF NARRATIVE: TIM PARKS ON HENRY GREEN’ @ 3:AM Magazine
Henry Green page @ Facebook
Henry Green @ goodreads
‘Silent Treatment: Benjamin Anastas on Henry Green’ @ Bookforum
‘Henry Green, the last English Modernist’ @ TLS
Henry Green @ Dalkey Archive
Buy Henry Green’s books
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Manuscript
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Interview
by Terry Southern
from The Paris Review
INTERVIEWER: Now, you have a body of work, ten novels, which many critics consider the most elusive and enigmatic in contemporary literature—and yourself, professionally or as a personality, none the less so. I’m wondering if these two mysteries are merely coincidental?
HENRY GREEN: What’s that? I’m a trifle hard of hearing.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I’m referring to such things as your use of a pseudonym, your refusal to be photographed, and so on. May I ask the reason for it?
GREEN: I didn’t want my business associates to know I wrote novels. Most of them do now, though . . . know I mean, not write, thank goodness.
INTERVIEWER: And has this affected your relationships with them?
GREEN: Yes, yes, oh yes—why, some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine, Living. And as I was going round the iron foundry one day, a loam molder said to me, “I read your book, Henry.” “And did you like it?” I asked, rightly apprehensive. He replied, “I didn’t think much of it, Henry.” Too awful.
Then, you know, with a customer, at the end of a settlement which has deteriorated into a compromise painful to both sides, he may say, “I suppose you are going to put this in a novel.” Very awkward.
INTERVIEWER: I see.
GREEN: Yes, it’s best they shouldn’t know about one. And one should never be known by sight.
INTERVIEWER: You have, however, been photographed from the rear.
GREEN: And a wag said: “I’d know that back anywhere.”
INTERVIEWER: I’ve heard it remarked that your work is “too sophisticated” for American readers, in that it offers no scenes of violence—and “too subtle,” in that its message is somewhat veiled. What do you say?
GREEN: Unlike the wilds of Texas, there is very little violence over here. A bit of child killing, of course, but no straight shootin’. After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: “I just ferment my food now.” Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing. The unusual at this period is to get anywhere at all—God damn!
INTERVIEWER: And how about “subtle”?
GREEN: I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide—now forbidden—of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming pyre. I don’t want my wife to do that when my time comes—and with great respect, as I know her, she won’t …
INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, you misheard me; I said, “subtle”—that the message was too subtle.
GREEN: Oh, subtle. How dull!
INTERVIEWER: … yes, well now I believe that two of your books, Blindness and Pack My Bag, are said to be “autobiographical,” isn’t that so?
GREEN: Yes, those two are mostly autobiographical. But where they are about myself, they are not necessarily accurate as a portrait; they aren’t photographs. After all, no one knows what he is like, he just tries to give some sort of picture of his time. Not like a cat to fight its image in the mirror.
INTERVIEWER: The critic Alan Pryce-Jones has compared you to Jouhandeau and called you an “odd, haunted, ambiguous writer.” Did you know that?
GREEN: I was in the same house with him at Eton. He was younger than me, so he saw through me perhaps.
INTERVIEWER: Do you find critical opinion expressed about your work useful or interesting?
GREEN: Invariably useless and uninteresting—when it is from daily papers or weeklies, which give so little space nowadays. But there is a man called Edward Stokes who has written a book about me and who knows all too much. I believe the Hogarth Press is going to publish it. And then the French translator of Loving, he wrote two articles in some French monthly. Both of these are valuable to me.
INTERVIEWER: I’d like to ask you some questions now about the work itself. You’ve described your novels as “nonrepresentational.” I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?
GREEN: “Nonrepresentational” was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them which have not in fact been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus, when writing, I “represent” very closely what I see (and I’m not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is “nonrepresentational” because it is not necessarily what others see and hear.
INTERVIEWER: And yet, as I understand this theory, its success does not depend upon any actual sensory differences between people talking, but rather upon psychological or emotional differences between them as readers, isn’t that so? I’m referring to the serious use of this theory in communicative writing.
GREEN: People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.
INTERVIEWER: And that is your crabwise approach.
GREEN: To your question, yes. And to stop one’s asking why I don’t write plays, my answer is I’d rather have these sparks in black and white than liable to interpretation by actors and the producer of a piece.
INTERVIEWER: When you begin to write something, do you begin with a certain situation in mind, or rather with a certain character in mind?
GREEN: Situation every time. I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service in the war. He was serving with me in the ranks and told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy liked most in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.
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Book
Henry Green Nothing
NRYB Classics
‘Years ago, Jane Weatherby had a torrid affair with John Pomfret, the husband of her best friend. Divorces ensued. World War II happened. Prewar partying gave way to postwar austerity, and Jane and John’s now-grown children, Philip and Mary, both as serious and sober as their parents were not, seem earnestly bent on marriage, which John and Jane consider a mistake. The two old lovers conspire against the two young lovers, and nothing turns out quite as expected.
‘Nothing, like the closely related Doting, is a book that is almost entirely composed in dialogue, since in these late novels nothing so interested Green as how words resist, twist, and expose our intentions; how they fail us, lead us on, make fools of us, and may, in spite of ourselves, even save us, at least for a time. Nothing spills over with the bizarre and delicious comedy and poetry of human incoherence.’ — NYRB Classics
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** James, You have shitty indoor heating where you live? I’m trying to imagine how a divorced dad dresses, and I can’t, which is interesting. I feel like people don’t know what the word guilty actually means when they use it. Homosexuals probably congregate in pubs and such places during the winter? Sex is whatever you want it to be, no? Hence guys who get off on watching other guys step on bananas or popping balloons. So, are you going to go to university? Thank you about the blog. Some people have told me they go to my blog instead of going to university. It’s cheaper. No snow here either. Not a fleck. I’ve never watched Ru Paul’s Drag Whatever show, but I think people walk fancily on it, from what I gather. Girls are excellent walkers, to grotesquely generalise. Yeah, Jamie likes my stuff, which is an honor, obviously. Did you meet your new English teacher, and were they a shining beacon of future importable brilliance, if so? Two more sips of coffee and I should be okay. ** Steeqhen, I feel pretty certain that you’re here now. And hopefully you feel like you’re fully equipped. I guess we’ll chat soon and make a plan? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, you remember. The past is beginning to catch us with the present. Well, let me know if I’m mistaken in my feeling that I absolutely don’t need to see ‘Queer’. You found the quoted song, and you like it! You are ever more a soul mate. Now I have to find yours or rather love’s somehow. Love is stronger than witchcraft, G. ** Misanthrope, Timberlands for me. Too many holes. Your supposed friend just seems completely untrustworthy to me. For me, if a friend or whoever betrays my trust, that’s it, it’s over. Real trust once broken can never be re-earned. ** _Black_Acrylic, Sexy looking park there, haha. I’ve been freezing my ass off here every time I went outdoors, but yesterday I found a scarf, and, wow, a warm neck makes such a big difference. I guess that’s why everyone wears them. I thought it was just some kind of mindless winter tradition. ** jay, Hi. Very happy to have intersected with one of your wavelengths. That photo you isolated does kind of take the cake as they say and whatever that means. Maybe I’ll at least skip around in ‘Hannibal’ if I can find it in a form that allows such movement. Thank you. Could be a boon, clearly. That game sounds good. What’s its name? Sorry if you told me and I forgot. I’m still thinking I’ll do ‘Lorelei’ next once Mario has fully unfolded origami Peach. ** Steve, Okay, hm, I will try to see ‘Hannibal’ somehow. Oh, so it’s like ‘Buffy’, I mean that you have to have an amount of faith to get through the first season. Everyone, Steve has reviewed the much anticipated new Ethel Cain album and also the new Lambrini Girls album, which might also be very anticipated, I have no idea. Here. Yes, I just saw that Trump wants to use the military to invade and colonise Greenland and the Panama Canal. Are we really living in reality? I’m starting to wonder. No, I haven’t seen that Maclean work, but I will endeavor to. Thanks! ** Larst, Hey! Oh, sure. Total honor if the blog was an inspiration. Oh, wow, big congratulations on the ceasing drinking. I’m essentially a substance free body myself, if cigs and coffee don’t count. You’re being really productive and incredible, so it sounds like you have the payoff. I like being forced to make my mind inebriate me without outside help. It’s interesting. I know the name Catherine Lacey, but I haven’t read her. I’ll go see if I can find an excerpt or something and try that book. Thanks, pal! ** HaRpEr, I think for me normal just means being not stressed out. I feel like I can handle the other emotions. But of course I’m saying that while not feeling particularly much. I was going to say discussing whether Genet was damaging to the gay community seemed very early 90s, but then, yeah, specifying identity is big again, that’s right. I suspect others in your class were either relieved by your having said what you said or were inspired to start thinking more complexly. Yes, he came to the recent reading in NYC. He wrote a really beautiful review of my novel ‘God Jr.’ in the LA Times some years ago, still a life highlight for me. Unsurprising, the reaction at the time to ‘Queer Street’, yes. I’d like to think if people rediscovered that book now and read it, stuff would be different, but … weird time, this time. ** Justin D, Hi. Yes, complicit, that’s a much better term than guilty as I was talking with someone about above somewhere. My pleasure re: the post. So far no birthday plans, but I think things are afoot. I think I’m going to an electronic music festival that night mostly just because I bought a ticket before I realised it was on my birthday. And I’ll eat something unusual, but I’m not sure what. Thanks for the song. I’ll use it to give myself an early birthday gift. You’re so nice. Thank you, man. What are you doing on my birthday, eh? ** Lucas, ‘The Screens’ is interesting. Very ambitious for him. Steve just reviewed the Ethel Cain album, link above. I’m getting it too, duh. I’m okay. Saw a bunch of visiting friends yesterday, ate very yummy Ethiopian food. Not bad. I hope your week keeps you hugely afloat. ** Right. I haven’t spotlit a book by the great Henry Green in quite a while, so I thought I would that. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Hi!!
Will do – I’ll let you know what I think about “Queer” whenever I get around to watching it!
Of course! I always look up love’s songs. And yesterday’s song was impossible not to fall in love with right away. Mine came from “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” by Bright Eyes. I hadn’t listened to it in ages, and it just popped into my head, so I went with it.
Love hangs herself with the bed sheets in her cell, Od.
Hey Dennis,
You are right in your assumption! Stayed the night in Beauvais, and made my journey to Gare du Nord. Sat in the hostel terrace right now, awkwardly at a table because I have another hour til check in and it’s too wet outside to smoke and read (I should probably ease it on the smoking coz this weather is not helping my throat haha)
I feel like such an Irish person traveling when I say this, but the French suburbs reminded me so much of Ireland. Aside from the windowshutters (which are like painting a French flag on your house), the brief French signage, and certain architectural styles, a lot of the time I would look out the train and think “I’m on the train to Dublin and we’re passing through Portlaoise right now”. Although in Portlaoise it’s snowing, my friend sent me a picture from the train I imagined myself on. I was trying to read but I couldn’t stop gawking at the landscape outside and feeling both homesickness and this calm thought that if/when I move, I’ll see Ireland wherever I go.
Hopefully we’ll have sorted a time and place for tomorrow, I’m fine with anywhere at any time (though the hours of 11 onwards would probably be best!). See you tomorrow!!
hi Den! i am very very happy to find that my library has this book! a rare win for my library. it’s on my list now, thank you for the wonderful intro. i’ve sent you a message on fb about the gif work btw.
it’s so funny that you’ve just discovered the scarf! it really does do a massive job. it’s pretty cold here, and i keep my apartment pretty cold ’cause i’m scared of the electricity bill. and now i’m at the gallery most days and it is almost as cold as outside, it’s a big space that never really heats up. so i’m wearing a ton of clothes and standing near the heater regularly. we also had a big snow chaos day yesterday because it snowed absolute heaps. thankfully buses are running normally again today. my show opens in a week and a half! lots left to do but it’s progressing pretty well, and starting to come together which is very fun.
i also really love hannibal, though it’s true you have to power through the first season. on rewatching it the first season becomes very rich, but the first time i saw it it didn’t do as much. i’ve thought about you while watching it actually, because you’ve talked about dialogue in films and how it seems so relatively unimportant in film and tv these days. and i think hannibal is a show where dialogue is everything, often it seems like every single word chosen has so much significance, or the way a sentence is put together. especially as the 2nd and 3rd seasons progress. but a big recommendation from me. it’s also deeply funny lowkey.
do you have any parisian snow at the moment? how are you, what did you do yesterday? puss, kisses, kyss, bisous
k
Dennis, Yes, your Timberlands. Really, I’d never seen you in those before. It was always Chucks. Then again, I hadn’t seen you in, what, 5 years?
Yeah, I get the too many holes, though I have the smaller ones, but still…
I get you. I’m the same way. I’m not cutting this woman off, no, but I’m going to be very leery and wary going forward. If it happens again, then it’ll come to a head. I’m going with the assumption she was just trying to connect with Alex and be some sort of wise older person or some dumb shit like that, but that doesn’t really cut it for me. We’ll see what happens. Things have certainly changed for me, though.
Hey Dennis! Wow, that was a really interesting extract, really bizarre dialogue. I always really like conversations that don’t really involve communication of anything – I think I might not pursue this one further but still really interesting to read. Thanks for sharing!
Yeah, I second/third/fourth that the Ethel Cain album is amazing, I’ve always struggled with her more recent music, but this new album is spectacular. It’s way more sparse and strange than I was expecting – like, kick iiiii, or something – but then it sort of crashes upwards out of nowhere into harsh, super harsh electronic wall of noise as soon as you think you’re listening to a song you could put on a playlist of normal music. If there’s a highlight for me, I think I’d probably have to say “Pulldrone”, it’s got a sort of mechanical violin sound in the background that sort of erratically changes in pitch, with the same sort of sound profile as someone doing building works in the next room to you. Really cool!
The game I’m playing is Hitman – it’s sort of my go-to game to relax, because I know exactly how every aspect of it works. Oh, and my copy of Autoportrait has made its way into my (yaoi fan) flatmate’s bedroom so, I should be getting his thoughts on it pretty soon! Well, fingers crossed Mario gets his act together, best of luck to you guys.
Pretty sure that I have a Henry Green novel on my bookshelf somewhere, maybe Loving or Living? Will try and dig it out.
Temperatures in the UK are forecast to plunge down to -16 in the coming days. So yes, I do heartily recommend a scarf. Such accessories are definitely the way forward.
Never heard of Green – saying he trumps Waugh is high praise. But he makes a good case for himself in the interview, he’s very funny in that. When it comes to his actual writing it’s his lack of punctuation that sticks out most to me. When I write dialogue I find myself using commas quite heavily to try and capture the stop-start/pause-play sound/feel of conversation I personally feel when I’m talking, but Green’s sounds perfectly conversational even though it’s more flowy than how I write people talking. The extract is rather what listening to my grandmother talk sounds like. Cheers for a post on yet another dude who was hitherto unknown to me.
Our indoor heating is fine, it’s just, it’s rarely on, because my parents are stingy. I’m often freezing at either house.
My only model for how divorced dads dress is my own, and I don’t dress much like him – excluding the wooly jumper and Magritte shirt I’ve annexed from him.
Guilt is an unpleasant emotion. Do you feel much of it? It’s weirdly common for me to feel guilty.
I know where to find some pubs in my town. I highly doubt that there are many, if any fellow homosexuals in these pubs. But one never knows. And I’m too chicken to go into a pub and start trying to suss out who else in the room is also of my kind. Think you have a good or any gaydar at all, D-Dawg? I find it to be quite an intuitive thing. It’s the kind of thing I can just sense, or know, sometimes. It’s really cool, and a bit freaky to me.
Stepping on bananas doesn’t personally get me hot under the collar. Nor does watching guys pop balloons. No shame at all if others do, good for them.
Going to university is the plan, yes. Hopefully things’ll be queerer there. I’ll be far away from family (probably), studying English literature without having to juggle other topics I don’t care as much about, might join a society, might actually just like guys uninhibitedly instead of trying to hide what is so obvious, etc.
I have hopes for university. I have trouble believing that things won’t be much better there than here. This town is so fucking stifling.
The blog certainly isn’t as demanding as uni, mentally or fiscally. It’s good to have something to fall back on if I cock everything up, I spose.
No snow again, but healthy helpings of frost, across which I’ve slipped sometimes, without completely falling on my arse.
I have consumed a moderate amount of drag race, but a large bulk of that was via cultural osmosis as a gay dude trying to see what other gay dudes talk about on social media. I get most of the key references.
Catwalks – are they fancy walks? It strikes me more as something that’s just all about confidence and attitude.
I guess I’ll try to take ‘you walk like a girl, James’ from my friend as a compliment, then. I don’t know how girls think of the way they walk, or how that measures up to the self-conscious way I think about my walking. Which is apparently girly. People love slapping gendered labels on things, huhm.
I think I heard Xiu Xiu before I read any Cooper – but my first impression of Xiu Xiu was ‘ah. I do not like this.’ Whereas Closer and the football poem clicked with me instantly. And lately I’ve relistend to Xiu Xiu and thought ‘ah. This has some things I like.’
I did meet my new English teacher, yes. My nose for pedagogy sniffed out.. perhaps not the best ‘teacher,’ but what I *have* already determined is that he’s far better than my former unprofessional and terrible teacher I had for the first term in Upper Sixth. He doesn’t overtly espouse a hatred for the subject and career – like she did – and he understands Shakespeare, and how most people my age view Shakespeare, and he knows how to bridge gaps. And he mentioned Star Trek, which nets cool points. He’s funny, and nice. He’s just teetering on being a silver fox. After the first lesson with him I was already giddy, glad, and so grateful that I have him, now. He’s SO much better, and I think the rest of the class feels the exact same. He’s such an upgrade, that’s for damn sure. Lucky me, in this respect.
Hope those two sips of coffee were good, and all the others proceeding.
Oo, and, I finished the story! First work of writing of 2025 DONE! Uh, if anyone has time to kill and wants some juvenilia to read, it can be found here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/153868352
It’s ~10,000 words. Kind of The Sluts lite, maybe, by a total amateur, insofar as gayness, violence, and the internet are involved.
I’m sure in a few months I’ll hate it and be incredibly ashamed of it, but for now, I’m quite proud and quite happy with it :]
So cold. Happenings today: been very cold, had a yummy lunch, bumped into a friend, posted writing, been told to kill myself NUMEROUS times by an impressively dedicated chatroom user, and listened to Interpol.
Upcoming happenings: reading, maybe emailing. Tschuss!
Yeah, we have no idea if Trump seriously wants to invade and annex Greenland, and that’s very dangerous. A U.S. war with Denmark sure wasn’t something I expected in 2025.
If you have Shudder, I believe they’re currently streaming HANNIBAL. Brian Reitzell’s score, full of sampled and processed percussion, is also one of its attractions. Six soundtrack albums were released, but he composed music for every second of all of its 42-minute episodes.
In the wake of the current fire, are your friends in Los Angeles OK?
I don’t like Drag Race at all when I have tried to watch it. I don’t really like the aesthetics or sensibilities of modern drag at all and have never been to a drag show because I don’t really find them interesting. I like some drag-related media from the 70s and 80s, like I have been watching 70s stuff on Ubu recently and liked Nick Zedd’s They Eat Scum and the Yonemoto brothers’ Garage Sale, which have drag elements. I also had a friend torrent All Hail the New Puritan for me, very interesting film. I am interested in stuff like Divine, Jayne County, Amanda Lear, John Sex, Klaus Nomi, and so on but not really the newer evolution of where that went after Ru Paul and reality TV. I do like Supermodel, his fluke pop hit from the mid 90s.
I am still catching up on last year’s albums. I am listening to Seiko Oomori’s This Is Japanese Girl. She makes very maximalist, chaotic, genre-hopping, kind of proggy pop songs that are still very kawaii and otaku-coded. Kind of a successor to Jun Togawa and Ringo Shiina. She has a tendency to include English swearing in her songs (“holy shit” “fuck you”) that I find very funny. I don’t like this record as much as the older ones but there’s a lot of material on it that I think is good or interesting.
RuPaul’s pre-“Supermodel” punk-influenced house music is pretty good.
I’ve found that because I’m gay, a lot of people (mostly but not always heterosexuals) expect me to be familiar with RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE. It’s like expecting all gay men to love Madonna and Lady Gaga.
I will give it a try. I really do like all things house, hi-NRG, Italo, electro, etc. I remember having a mild degree of interest in the wave of drag-adjacent rappers that had house beats a decade ago; don’t know how much that developed into a “thing” or if it was kind of faddish.
I haven’t had people expect me to like much of that stuff. Like people are surprised that I like Madonna so much. More from an interest in electronic music than belong to a cultural affinity group, though. I can’t imagine anyone expecting me to like Drag Race, honestly. I don’t know what people “expect” me to like, beyond just generally things that are scary or odd or obscure. Sometimes people expect me to know about BTS or whatever othe Kpop thing because I talk a lot about (usually very niche and oddball) Japanese pop; they don’t get that it’s not really the same thing at all.
I don’t know, people don’t so much clock me as gay because really I’m not, I guess. Hard to explain: I’m attracted to scenes, scenarios, and behaviors around a set of kinks and paraphilias; to specific people, not so much so it’s almost gender-blind in a way. Like if there’s a “gay vs. queer” spectrum, all the way queer; a “kink vs. sex” spectrum, all the way kink.
I have a brother who is like conventionally gay, like into going to the gym and female celebrity stuff. He watches so much reality TV stuff. I’m like if it’s not Kitchen Nightmares, Nathan for You, or My Cat From Hell, I’m completely checked out.
I want to say I haven’t read anything by Henry Green but about half of the times I say that I go and read the author and discover that, even if in extract form, I’ve had some contact, so I’m simply going to say that I’m adding him to my reading list. My aesthetic year (2024) is truly over, and now it’s time for a political year. I usually follow this cycle of reading/writing about books and then social stuff then back to books. Not that the two are divorced, but just in a sort of direct way. It enhances your understanding of both etc and all that but also one just gets tired of each after a while. The doing of the social stuff must never stop, of course. This means I’ll be a lot more boring to talk to this year, because thinking about books means thinking about different things near-daily (or even more frequently) whereas thinking about social stuff means meditating for years on the same things. Just musing here today, I suppose. Are your friends OK with the wildfires?
Loved the excerpts today. Hope you’re well, Dennis. I bought Baudelaire’s letters from infinity land and the book is a dream. So nice to hold. Great to see the blog featured it. The letters are good, but the art and supplementing content are my favorite parts. Huge fan of Les Fleurs du Mal, Richard Howard’s translation, so they are side by side on my bookshelf.
P.S. that laser eyes game you were talking about a while ago showed up on my Playstation service recently. It looks really cool. I also saw a movie that made me think of you last night. The new Nosferatu. Very beautiful dark and erotic. I enjoyed it.
Hey. Henry Green is definitely for me so thank you for this addition to my future reading pile. Seems like will have the Barbara Pym effect on me where I will be curious to read them all. Very strange and nice cover of the book also
Is the Efteling happening?
I was thinking yesterday, to catch up where we last left it, the favourite nose thing we said. Is your favourite nose like River Phoenix’s?
This is what I would think at first
So yesterday I met with a very beautiful guy and… and as I was looking at his perfect mouth and nose I was, when I was later alone in the streets super imposing faces of girls and boys on top of buildings in my imagination
So I visualise my drawing over pictures idea to do haunting faces on top of evocative landscape and city view and buildings to tell stories of non existent souls that could exist near you
So eyes and lips and mouth was all I saw and recurring characteristics one loves and is drawn to…
I know that you don’t remember your dreams and I have come to the conclusion they are mostly totes random but I saw yesterday a dream that showed a clear line between obsessive love, highschool love going to young adult love and the faces and situations mingling and transforming from the one to the other with ease like it’s the same person you have in the corners of your mind A ghost you encounter in disguises
Maybe thas has directly to do with the faces I will try and draw, showing the similar same soul in others that you seek time and time again
I hope I can get it out of my system if I am onto something
Speaking of Rupaul above I am fan of the show for years but took a long break after burnout from like 2019 and after did not see anything after that.
Very related, I used to follow the videos of videographer Nelson Sullivan, the company World of Wonder who does the Rupaul show did a film with some of them but they are of course countless videos and hours of hours I don’t know if they are on YouTube anymore but I used to watch them years back… and felt like I was there where I could never be because I was here and in another time
Love from Crete…
Hi! I love Henry Green. I read ‘Loving’ recently and own this one as well but am yet to get to it. I really have a thing for books that are mostly dialogue. Ivy Compton-Burnett particularly, and William Gaddis as well. I remember writing a story as a kid, probably 11 years old, and my teacher in school told me that you can’t make a story that’s mostly dialogue, so the fetish for those kinds of books might exist in me for that reason. But as a person I love gossip, so maybe that’s why. I’m the least patriotic person on the planet but the only British tradition I feel I have any affinity for is the history of witty eccentrics, and I suppose Green and Compton-Burnett fit into that.
Yeah, you’re right about saying Genet makes queers look bad is very 90’s, and yes, we’re kind of in a similar place now in terms of these conversations. I think my reply was that it was kind of homophobic in itself to say that one writer who happens to be queer has to be forced to stand for the whole community. I kind of said it abruptly and awkwardly though so the lecturer gave me the death stare for a moment.
I’m currently working on this poetry chapbook for university work. We have to do this dumb thing after every poem where we have a block of text which is supposed to be like the equivalent of the text you see beside the art in galleries, which sucks. I’m just writing about the form and inspirations and process and not ‘what it means’ or whatever. We only have to do this because the university doesn’t really know how to mark artistic things by their own merit, which is understandable I guess, but the solution isn’t exactly great either.
Hey, Dennis! Any act(s) in particular that you’re looking forward to seeing at the festival? You’re not missing much re: ‘Drag Race’. The format has become pretty stale and nowhere near as exciting as it was many years ago. I think you’d really like The Boulet Brothers’ ‘Dragula’, though. Mixing horror, filth and glamor, it’s a much more artistically-driven/alternative version of a ‘drag’ competition. Here’s the trailer for the latest season. No plans for Friday for me yet. If I get up to anything of note, I’ll fill you in!
Fuck, these wildfires in L.A. are terrifying!
Hey, it’s been a while! Really great posts for the last week… pf p[articular note for me were the plastic and Toilet 2… i do love plastic… and toilets… and those huge chonked up crunch dessert things in the sideways urinals… most of all I loved the photographs… Kohei Yoshiyuki’s… and then I looked up the book on ebay and saw the cheapest one was $100. Then got upset. Why can’t beautiful art be in my hands… it’s not fair… and living in a place quite dry of contemporary art museums, too… But I’m so grateful that you included so many images from it. That blogpost will be the book I have in place of the real one for now. One image in particular I looked at and just couldn’t think anything other than… look at that… they’re all just playing… playing dolls in the nighttime, but they don’t need the dolls…
Things are better. I have a job that pays enough for me to freakout only a few times a month versus whatever else was the case. I think this is the normal amount of freakouts; I am grateful. You ever get to do your tour of the sewer? Wishing you well.
oh, forgot to add– you wrote something about hating that movie The Lighthouse–I don’t really understand the love for it and feel similarly. very drab and masculine, yes. It’s pretending to be imaginative by doing things that would surprise a protestant, which apparently everyone is and doesn’t know, considering the ways the internet turns. I saw a review for the guy’s new movie that said something to the effect of, “should be more serious about being playful”, and I think that says all of it for me.
Hi, good morning. Forgot to pick up my copy of ‘The Screens’ yesterday since I’m at my dad’s currently but it’s whatever. I’ll finish ‘Funeral Rites’ first. I was reading it yesterday and the way Genet describes Pierrot sort of reminded me of the way you describe some of your characters. Like that patheticness really comes through. I like that. Mostly because I think I would be totally unable to achieve that. I think I’m too sensitive for it in some weird way. Have a nice day.
Oh, also: listened to the new Ethel Cain album, albeit not fully, and it’s pretty good. It’s unfortunately not as mind blowing as I expected it to be but it really is a step up from her 2022 album.
Thanks for such a kind message. I’m a writer and a painter. Poetry mostly, but I also have a blog I started last year where I write about art and stuff. I post some of my own art there too: https://dangcarroll.wordpress.com/2024/12/28/a-dozen-jokers/
Hopefully that link works I’m on my phone. The site is basic as hell, trying to format it is like the bane of my existence and I’ve kind of just given up as long as it’s readable. I don’t know if you have those problems but your blog totally inspired me to have a site of my own that’s not privy to whatever or whoever and I can just post whatever interests or ideas I have. My goal was to post two things a month but by the end of 2024 I’d done 30, so that’s felt good to have going on while working retail.
We also finally got sunshine for the first time in the new year. I’m currently unemployed which means I can paint for like 7 hours a day but I’ll hopefully get this part time job at the sex store.