📙 Getting Personal

I believe in the aesthetically impure as an accurate reflection of reality, just as I believe in the acceptance of compromise as a political ideal.

It was then I think I learned that if you stay very quiet and listen to the confusion of others and nod from time to time, people will think you understand. They will go away feeling better.

Myself, I am made uncomfortable by the notion that mankind is, at bottom, brutal. I would prefer to honor the ironies, pleasures and civilities of life. Yet I cannot get beyond certain brutal memories from childhood whose rumble I still hear going on in my head like an inner trembling. And maybe I hold on to them too much, also, out of pride.

The closeness with which dreams of gallantry and revenge were tangled in my brain must be why, even today, when I remember to act in a polite manner (for instance, giving up my seat to a woman in the bus) and am thanked for being “chivalrous,” I instantly feel a twinge of guilty conscience.

The Bible is filled with a sexual-economic fear of women, not unlike the general in Dr. Strangelove who practices celibacy so as to hold on to his “precious bodily fluids.

This is at the heart of the male fear of Woman: that she will touch him in that sore place and open up his bottomless need for mother-love, which he had thought he had outgrown, and he will lose his ability to defend himself.

My mechanical ineptness is so fertile that it borders on creativity.

I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear.

Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us.

At the same time, movies helped push me deeper into a monastic avoidance of the body. In the cinematic postulant, there is an ascetic element that exists, paradoxically, side by side with the worship of beauty: a tendency to equate the act of watching a film with praying.

How few cutrate stratagems there are to better our mood: you can take a trip, go shopping, change your hair, see every movie in town—and the list is exhausted.

Myself, I still believe in love, what do I need commitment for?

The transformation from a preoccupied urban intellectual to a sexual animal involves, at times, an almost superhuman strain.

I suppose the moral is that a friend can serve as a corrective to our insular miseries simply by offering up his essential otherness.

This is one of those large intimidating pronouncements to which one gives assent in public while secretly harboring doubts.

In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology.

The American devotees I knew also displayed a parvenu fascination with Tibetan aristocracy (the Dalai Lama and his retinue, the ranks of lamas) that I can only compare to the way Texas moneyed society grovels before the British royals.

Still, unable to announce my citizenly existence in the standard manner, I started to feel vaguely on the run, like an outlaw or an illegal alien, although I was paying quite a hefty rent.

You learn more about a person by living in his house for a week than by years of running into him at social gatherings. This information is sometimes as tiny and precise as the dry goods kept in the pantry, which constitute his or her notions of emergency solace.

Another time I sublet in Tribeca from a stylishly pretty woman: her silk kimonos, her peignoirs, her sachets cohabited with my undershorts and T-shirts in the limited dresser space. Not only did I have the pleasure of sleeping in this glamorous woman’s bed, albeit without her, I also experienced myself for fractions of a second as a glamorous woman.

Trying on other lives is the privilege of the actor, the novelist, the schizophrenic—and the subletter.

With a mixture of stewardship, voyeurism, longing, and parasitic contempt, I haunt the rooms I have borrowed.

And, just as a drag costume insinuates an element of satire, however mediated by admiration, so, too, the first time I welcome a guest to my borrowed quarters and show him or her about, with the ironic pride of a nonpossessor, the urge to mock the taste of the original tenants is very strong.

I always seemed to be getting a headache in that apartment, partly because of the dense prose I was trying to riddle, and partly from the poor ventilation, but mostly, I think, because I kept banging my head.

Like that a robber who makes sure to remove fingerprints, I was destroying all evidence of my tenure.

I AM A MAN WHO TILTS. When I am sitting, my head slants to the right; when walking, the upper part of my body reaches forward to catch a sneak preview of the street. One way or another, I seem to be off-center—or “uncentered,” to use the jargon of holism. My lousy posture, a tendency to slump or put myself into lazy, contorted misalignments, undoubtedly contributes to lower back pain. For a while I correct my bad habits, do morning exercises, sit straight, breathe deeply, but always an inner demon that insists on approaching the world askew resists perpendicularity.

Sometimes I can feel my mouth arching downward in an ironic smile, which, at its best, reassures others that we need not take everything so seriously—because we are all in the same comedy together—and, at its worst, expresses a superior skepticism.

Of course, if in the beginning I had thought I was coming across accurately, I never would have bothered to become a writer.

Jung says somewhere that we pay dearly over many years to learn about ourselves what a stranger can see at a glance.

It became natural that our fin de siècle exhaustion and cultural despair should be enunciated by a tall Texan with cowboy boots.

Just to show the internalized superego (God or my wife) that I have made an effort to Communicate, I volunteer some news about myself.

I was always waiting for life to become tragic, so that I would merely have to record it to become a powerful, universal writer.

I believe in the aesthetically impure as an accurate reflection of reality, just as I believe in the acceptance of compromise as a political ideal.

It was then I think I learned that if you stay very quiet and listen to the confusion of others and nod from time to time, people will think you understand. They will go away feeling better.

Myself, I am made uncomfortable by the notion that mankind is, at bottom, brutal. I would prefer to honor the ironies, pleasures and civilities of life. Yet I cannot get beyond certain brutal memories from childhood whose rumble I still hear going on in my head like an inner trembling. And maybe I hold on to them too much, also, out of pride.

The closeness with which dreams of gallantry and revenge were tangled in my brain must be why, even today, when I remember to act in a polite manner (for instance, giving up my seat to a woman in the bus) and am thanked for being “chivalrous,” I instantly feel a twinge of guilty conscience.

The Bible is filled with a sexual-economic fear of women, not unlike the general in Dr. Strangelove who practices celibacy so as to hold on to his “precious bodily fluids.

This is at the heart of the male fear of Woman: that she will touch him in that sore place and open up his bottomless need for mother-love, which he had thought he had outgrown, and he will lose his ability to defend himself.

My mechanical ineptness is so fertile that it borders on creativity.

I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear.

Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us.

At the same time, movies helped push me deeper into a monastic avoidance of the body. In the cinematic postulant, there is an ascetic element that exists, paradoxically, side by side with the worship of beauty: a tendency to equate the act of watching a film with praying.

How few cutrate stratagems there are to better our mood: you can take a trip, go shopping, change your hair, see every movie in town—and the list is exhausted.

Myself, I still believe in love, what do I need commitment for?

The transformation from a preoccupied urban intellectual to a sexual animal involves, at times, an almost superhuman strain.

I suppose the moral is that a friend can serve as a corrective to our insular miseries simply by offering up his essential otherness.

This is one of those large intimidating pronouncements to which one gives assent in public while secretly harboring doubts.

In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology.

The American devotees I knew also displayed a parvenu fascination with Tibetan aristocracy (the Dalai Lama and his retinue, the ranks of lamas) that I can only compare to the way Texas moneyed society grovels before the British royals.

Still, unable to announce my citizenly existence in the standard manner, I started to feel vaguely on the run, like an outlaw or an illegal alien, although I was paying quite a hefty rent.

You learn more about a person by living in his house for a week than by years of running into him at social gatherings. This information is sometimes as tiny and precise as the dry goods kept in the pantry, which constitute his or her notions of emergency solace.

Another time I sublet in Tribeca from a stylishly pretty woman: her silk kimonos, her peignoirs, her sachets cohabited with my undershorts and T-shirts in the limited dresser space. Not only did I have the pleasure of sleeping in this glamorous woman’s bed, albeit without her, I also experienced myself for fractions of a second as a glamorous woman.

Trying on other lives is the privilege of the actor, the novelist, the schizophrenic—and the subletter.

With a mixture of stewardship, voyeurism, longing, and parasitic contempt, I haunt the rooms I have borrowed.

And, just as a drag costume insinuates an element of satire, however mediated by admiration, so, too, the first time I welcome a guest to my borrowed quarters and show him or her about, with the ironic pride of a nonpossessor, the urge to mock the taste of the original tenants is very strong.

I always seemed to be getting a headache in that apartment, partly because of the dense prose I was trying to riddle, and partly from the poor ventilation, but mostly, I think, because I kept banging my head.

Like that a robber who makes sure to remove fingerprints, I was destroying all evidence of my tenure.

I AM A MAN WHO TILTS. When I am sitting, my head slants to the right; when walking, the upper part of my body reaches forward to catch a sneak preview of the street. One way or another, I seem to be off-center—or “uncentered,” to use the jargon of holism. My lousy posture, a tendency to slump or put myself into lazy, contorted misalignments, undoubtedly contributes to lower back pain. For a while I correct my bad habits, do morning exercises, sit straight, breathe deeply, but always an inner demon that insists on approaching the world askew resists perpendicularity.

Sometimes I can feel my mouth arching downward in an ironic smile, which, at its best, reassures others that we need not take everything so seriously—because we are all in the same comedy together—and, at its worst, expresses a superior skepticism.

Of course, if in the beginning I had thought I was coming across accurately, I never would have bothered to become a writer.

Jung says somewhere that we pay dearly over many years to learn about ourselves what a stranger can see at a glance.

It became natural that our fin de siècle exhaustion and cultural despair should be enunciated by a tall Texan with cowboy boots.

Just to show the internalized superego (God or my wife) that I have made an effort to Communicate, I volunteer some news about myself.

I was always waiting for life to become tragic, so that I would merely have to record it to become a powerful, universal writer.

I believe in the aesthetically impure as an accurate reflection of reality, just as I believe in the acceptance of compromise as a political ideal.

It was then I think I learned that if you stay very quiet and listen to the confusion of others and nod from time to time, people will think you understand. They will go away feeling better.

Myself, I am made uncomfortable by the notion that mankind is, at bottom, brutal. I would prefer to honor the ironies, pleasures and civilities of life. Yet I cannot get beyond certain brutal memories from childhood whose rumble I still hear going on in my head like an inner trembling. And maybe I hold on to them too much, also, out of pride.

The closeness with which dreams of gallantry and revenge were tangled in my brain must be why, even today, when I remember to act in a polite manner (for instance, giving up my seat to a woman in the bus) and am thanked for being “chivalrous,” I instantly feel a twinge of guilty conscience.

The Bible is filled with a sexual-economic fear of women, not unlike the general in Dr. Strangelove who practices celibacy so as to hold on to his “precious bodily fluids.

This is at the heart of the male fear of Woman: that she will touch him in that sore place and open up his bottomless need for mother-love, which he had thought he had outgrown, and he will lose his ability to defend himself.

My mechanical ineptness is so fertile that it borders on creativity.

I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear.

Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us.

At the same time, movies helped push me deeper into a monastic avoidance of the body. In the cinematic postulant, there is an ascetic element that exists, paradoxically, side by side with the worship of beauty: a tendency to equate the act of watching a film with praying.

How few cutrate stratagems there are to better our mood: you can take a trip, go shopping, change your hair, see every movie in town—and the list is exhausted.

Myself, I still believe in love, what do I need commitment for?

The transformation from a preoccupied urban intellectual to a sexual animal involves, at times, an almost superhuman strain.

I suppose the moral is that a friend can serve as a corrective to our insular miseries simply by offering up his essential otherness.

This is one of those large intimidating pronouncements to which one gives assent in public while secretly harboring doubts.

In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology.

The American devotees I knew also displayed a parvenu fascination with Tibetan aristocracy (the Dalai Lama and his retinue, the ranks of lamas) that I can only compare to the way Texas moneyed society grovels before the British royals.

Still, unable to announce my citizenly existence in the standard manner, I started to feel vaguely on the run, like an outlaw or an illegal alien, although I was paying quite a hefty rent.

You learn more about a person by living in his house for a week than by years of running into him at social gatherings. This information is sometimes as tiny and precise as the dry goods kept in the pantry, which constitute his or her notions of emergency solace.

Another time I sublet in Tribeca from a stylishly pretty woman: her silk kimonos, her peignoirs, her sachets cohabited with my undershorts and T-shirts in the limited dresser space. Not only did I have the pleasure of sleeping in this glamorous woman’s bed, albeit without her, I also experienced myself for fractions of a second as a glamorous woman.

Trying on other lives is the privilege of the actor, the novelist, the schizophrenic—and the subletter.

With a mixture of stewardship, voyeurism, longing, and parasitic contempt, I haunt the rooms I have borrowed.

And, just as a drag costume insinuates an element of satire, however mediated by admiration, so, too, the first time I welcome a guest to my borrowed quarters and show him or her about, with the ironic pride of a nonpossessor, the urge to mock the taste of the original tenants is very strong.

I always seemed to be getting a headache in that apartment, partly because of the dense prose I was trying to riddle, and partly from the poor ventilation, but mostly, I think, because I kept banging my head.

Like that a robber who makes sure to remove fingerprints, I was destroying all evidence of my tenure.

I AM A MAN WHO TILTS. When I am sitting, my head slants to the right; when walking, the upper part of my body reaches forward to catch a sneak preview of the street. One way or another, I seem to be off-center—or “uncentered,” to use the jargon of holism. My lousy posture, a tendency to slump or put myself into lazy, contorted misalignments, undoubtedly contributes to lower back pain. For a while I correct my bad habits, do morning exercises, sit straight, breathe deeply, but always an inner demon that insists on approaching the world askew resists perpendicularity.

Sometimes I can feel my mouth arching downward in an ironic smile, which, at its best, reassures others that we need not take everything so seriously—because we are all in the same comedy together—and, at its worst, expresses a superior skepticism.

Of course, if in the beginning I had thought I was coming across accurately, I never would have bothered to become a writer.

Jung says somewhere that we pay dearly over many years to learn about ourselves what a stranger can see at a glance.

It became natural that our fin de siècle exhaustion and cultural despair should be enunciated by a tall Texan with cowboy boots.

Just to show the internalized superego (God or my wife) that I have made an effort to Communicate, I volunteer some news about myself.

I was always waiting for life to become tragic, so that I would merely have to record it to become a powerful, universal writer.