A well-performed play can be the just needed Rx for summer doldrums.
Picture from Siskiyou Wilderness 10/2004
"Proust says that love is the perfect training for a writer since it makes us jealous and alert and suspicious and leads us to submit the beloved to a circular analysis that later we can apply to any literary subject."
-Edmund White My Lives
I'm currently reading E. White's memoirs, I'm trying to finish it before I leave the country tonight; I only have one chapter left. Another memoir devoured and digested.
I love reading memoirs, biographies, auto-biographies and diaries because it gives me a window to look into another's life; an opportunity to inhabit their brain as they sift through their life experiences and try to make sense of the disorderly conduct which makes up a life.
In White's memoir, I mostly enjoy the candid and revealing depictions of his love affairs and romances. I cannot go into more detail than that, for fear of attracting lurid attention. I don't think I have the stomach to impart from my personal life the scenes he describes so openly, and so publicly. However, I do find his sordid details entertaining and enlightening, at least. S-x is one of those topics, for which I have a detached amusement with no moral assignments. It is an action others find so essential and compulsory, yet I find charming, but nonconsuming. There are other thoughts I am more likely to dwell upon; in reading about White's s-xual stunts, I realized how little I think or even chose to remember such details in my own life. Instead much of my relationships were centered on conversations, shared interests, and time spent together; s-x happened for sure, but was always a periphery. Not to paint a picture as though I was some ice-queen, I enjoy it certainly, but only in addition to love.
Perhaps, it is the same for White, in all his exploits, he saturates those memories with love.
Some good reviews in case you are thinking of reading this book:
http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0614,beller,72712,10.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,1572447,00.html
Tonight I'm off to Taiwan, I'll be back with plenty of pictures, I suspect, and maybe a book review- a real one.
