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masking a creepy form of male arrogance
Monday, October 8 2001
I met Gretchen at Union Square's dog run after work again today and we walked from there into the East Village. The sound of buses rumbling over metal plates in the street made an ominous rumbling like distant thunder, which was disconcerting on this picture-perfect crisp, clear autumn day. Everybody is waiting for the next shoe to drop, but worldwide it's been nothing but a confusion of dangling shoelaces: two anthrax cases in Florida, a lunatic with a boxcutter in a Greyhound bus in Tennessee, an exploding jetliner over the Black Sea, and the Red Line subway being shut down this morning for some reason that I've yet to learn.
We dined at Burritoville, Gretchen's favorite burrito place in the East Village. Somehow the place manages to be simultaneously hip, cheap, and clean, three attributes that are generally mutually-exclusive. CNN with subtitles was on the teevee over the counter and a lesbian couple were macking on one another in the corner. Gretchen had smuggled in a half bottle of red wine she'd been given at her factotal day job, and we sipped this as we ate our all-natural vegetarian burritos. Gretchen also gave me a complete history of her poetry career so I'd know all the important players at the poetry reading we'd be attending tonight. Just so you know, Gretchen's history as a poet began with an uncertain future back in the late 1980s, when she was rejected from Oberlin's creative writing program. Much more recently, she found herself enrolled in the dubious poetry program at Brooklyn College. Dissatisfied, she enrolled in a summer program at Sarah Lawrence. There she was "discovered" by TL, one of the professors, and immediately allowed to transfer to the Sarah Lawrence program. Since then, of course, she's moved on to measurable poetic success, with three poems awaiting publication at the Paris Review.
The poetry reading was in the back room of the 11th Street Bar between Avenues A and B in the East Village. It was dark and crowded room lit mostly by candles. Gretchen knew lots of people there, but one of the readers, TL, the professor who had "discovered" her, was out suffering from a migraine.
I fully expected to be bored by the readings, especially when they took awhile to get under way and Gretchen took the opportunity to trot me around like a show pony. But the poems were fun, intelligent and interesting, with one qualification.
One of the readers' poems had the annoying quality of someone masking a creepy form of male arrogance with self-deprecation. Don't get me wrong, shocking writing has its place. But what point is being made by imagining lips painted on a leach and attached to your arm as a surrogate lover? The poetry had an amateurish quality, like that of an overwrought and emotionally-stunted nineteen year old. This was especially true of the poem he'd just written about the September 11th tragedy. Some things need time: for copy editing, for fact-checking, for emotional perspective. This is why any biography of Osama bin Laden you're likely to buy at a bookstore today will be utter dreck. Gretchen was dismayed to learn that this poet was now actually teaching at Sarah Lawrence. "He's a one trick pony!" she exclaimed into my ear.
After the poetry had all been read, we were joined by Lin, one of Ray's friends who had been at our Boggle party, and we rode the F back to Park Slope together. Some woman was freaking out on the train because the way Gretchen was sitting, which was backwards in the chair so she could talk to Lin and me, seemed to threaten her precious daughter. "I'm not touching her!" Gretchen barked and continued on talking to us as if no objection had been raised.
Before we went to sleep, Gretchen and I had a long conversation that started out with a discussion of what is emphasized in writing (the writing itself or the themes developed). From there we launched into a discussion of the many strange hobbies, faiths, compulsions, and cultures people have signed onto. These have ranged from Orthodox Judaism to overclocked computers, from owl studies to Holy Jihad. "One can find comfort in anything," Gretchen concluded.
When I found out that the World Trade Center had been attacked by Islamic extremists, I remember that my first thought was that their cause seemed to trivialize the gravity of what had happened. I somehow hoped that the attack had been made by intergalactic aliens, Satan, or some either overwhelmingly unknowable evil. Then again, to witness a plane full of people careen without hesitation into a skyscraper full of people is to mentally promote whatever force sent it to the status of unknowable evil.
I've heard of people who are so distracted by their sex drives that they consider getting their sex organs removed. There was even a famous case of a medical student at the University of Chicago who, unsatisfied with the result of removing his own testicles, dug deep into his abdominal cavity and attempted to extract his adrenal glands. (He passed out after retracting his liver and was discovered by his roommate.) But what about my sex drive? What about the distraction it has caused me? Why don't I want to cut off my balls? I was thinking about it tonight and realized that it was because sexual thoughts are among the very few that don't get boring, even when repeatedly monotonously in my head.
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