Harsh, Ultraclear, Naturalistic

[Fresh at the weekend...]

[A lazy, overcast Sunday of reading what I want to read, for a change. As has become my tradition, I consumed Gregory Maguire's latest, Mirror, Mirror, in less than 24 hours, after walking yesterday in harsh, ultraclear winter sunlight to pick it up at the Embarcadero Postal Center where it had been waiting for me after Amazon had mailed it and no one had been home to receive it the other day. Oh, after that long sentence, I forgot what I even thought of the book. It was good, OK? Someone as popular and gimmicky as Maguire can't possibly be considered "literary," can he? Certainly his books lack that post-post-modern cutting edge that might qualify them to be held up in the better English departments as examples of what Authors were Doing at the Turn of the 21st Century. Yet there's grand entertainment, symbolism, and complex levels of meaning galore to gnaw on - all the reasons books become, or ought to become, beloved.]

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[Also read today two long articles linked by the tireless George, All About. (They were only two of the many pieces he's always offering for our edification, chosen by me at random mostly because they had the otherwise disparate names Anna Deavere Smith and Edmund White in their respective titles. I'm grateful, George, but where do you find the time to read all this stuff? I know you hold down a full-time job, but when do you find time for sloth or sin?) I was amused by a connection between the two: criticism in each of Naturalist, or Method, acting, one by a post-structuralist and one by a classicist. How like America to be caught in the middle. I find myself to be without an opinion...whatever Bette Davis accreted on to Margo Channing as written by Joseph Mankiewicz amounts to is whose campy camp I'm in, I guess.]

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[Me, I've found ample time for sloth and sin during what I declared to be my own long weekend, starting on Thursday night with a decadent invitation to Sean's apartment. WestAdd to SoMa: ended up dancing with Maria Gomez and John at PopScene. (Yes, we still find ourselves thrown together in social situations, and it's OK; this is the damnedest "break-up" you...well, I've ever heard of...we seem to be finding our natural level, like a river whose dam is torn down.) I didn't stay as long (well, I'd arrived late, thanks to pre-partying chez Sean), but still managed to gambol sufficiently to Depeche Mode, Hot Hot Heat, the Go-Go's, the Rolling Stones, Kelis, the Smiths, etc., before returning home to more people being glamorous and intoxicated in my living room.]

[No, I wasn't particularly effective at the internship on Friday, but we finally got the damned demurrer filed, and I made a start on my next assignment. It could've been worse.]

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[One last observation from the night before last, when I decided it was time to tear down another figurative dam. A lesson learned before, but here it is again: what masochists these size queens be. Because they can be, or because their audience allows (requires?) them to be, well-endowed men tend to be lazy in bed, and with them, to paraphrase Teri Garr in Tootsie, one is responsible for one's own...yeah. Who's really being selfish in this scenario? A very, uh, small percentage of my already diminutive readership knows on which side of the divide I fall, and as for the rest...find out for yourself!]

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