Allan Gurganus, Plays Well With Others:

• Do I miss my father? Well, my father was a decent man. There were moments of real sweetness: “New York, watch out!” Like so many guys that age – with the Depression and the War each landing a different kind of sucker punch – Dad was also a very very conventional man and hard a one. Remote. He grew up poor, wanting to make a million dollars. And he did! He made his cool million, if the hard way. He went to work on a Monday when I was about one year old and – in many ways – he never really came back home.

  Hard to explain how much of him ended up Missing in Action. Did he choose which parts to sacrifice, and why?

  I mean, he got to live in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman who loved him and with healthy sons who loved him or, at worst, really wanted to. Then he was a retired millionaire, and all of it was just as he had planned, just as any kid wearing an apron ever wished. Stil, it all had to be stated in question form. (No simple joyful assertions: “I have always been lucky in my friends.”) He seemed some hard-earned capital, proud never to have ever been “touched.” Severe penalties for early withdrawal.

  ---

  Fact is, Dad didn’t really want other people to have any fun, you know?

  ---

  The truth is – (and you are asking for the truth, right?) – most days, I don’t actually miss my father all that much.

  And yet, even now, evenings especially – I feel it. Some chronic low-grade longing, still.

  So, yeah, around office-closing-time:

  ---

  I do at least miss missing him.

• And, later, after the next to last of my friends died, after I escaped New York, didn’t I, moping around the hardware store of my new village, show both his affable surface and his overpressurized triggerpoint? People acted kind to me but I saw they felt they couldn’t really count on me, not yet. They whispered around me.

  In a shed behind my North Carolina house, I bent over some old windows. Each pane reflected the silhouette, stern, bowed, manly yet thickened toward the tanklike – and it was so much him, I had to rush indoors and sit somewhere and miss him.

  Did I earlier say I didn’t, that I only missed missing my father? What a flippant, queenly, overelegant and quite inaccurate revenge on half my being. I recall his three-pointed handkerchief as he headed to the Rainbow Room: “Watch out, New York!” I remember his saying, “Provide, provide, they told us.” I recollect the sight of him, having dragged my mother’s vacuum cleaner out into the garage, him down on all fours purging sand from the Buick’s back-seat carpet, and looking so intense and playful squatting there, using the screeching as something to hide in, his face grown childlike, rapt. Doing good, doing good well.

  Oh, Dad. I never even “interviewed” you.

  Would you, asked, have answered me?

  I will go on record. I still don’t exactly know why you were so strict with your young son. Did you fear that my emotions, my drama, would cut me off from seeming serious enough to be, say, anybody’s dad? That’s not true, Pop. I’ve several friends and children.

  I sometimes miss you, Sir.

I maintain this list since Artforum cannot manage to render or typeset such a thing.

1. Butt Boy

2. Swallow

3. The Hunt

4. Why Don’t You Just Die!

5. The Audition

6. Deerskin (“The fashion film of the year. A man becomes so fixated on a fringed jacket he finds in a thrift store that he sets out to kill every other person in the whole world who might dare to imitate his new signature look”)

7. The Human Voice

8. True History of the Kelly Gang

9. American Murder: The Family Next Door

10. Tie: The Trial of the Chicago 7 & Mangrove

It is preposterous to suppose that R.M. Vaughan’s death was anything other than a suicide, even if such has not been proven yet.

Update

(2020.11.03) Eldergay Suicides entry.

Confidential to Anna Mehler Paperny

Girl writer Anna Mehler Paperny demonstrated initial guts in pointing out the obvious. When challenged on her inability to search for or read these postings, even when provided with links to same, Paperny returned to her safe space of linking to articles about inequities faced by non-Whites and aboriginal criminals – and never acknowledged these articles’ existence.

I direct this downtown progressive journalist to the dek of Eldergay Suicides (emphasis added): “Older gay men, culturally unwanted and already the survivors of multiple holocausts, kill themselves with alarming regularity.” It would be better for all of us if Paperny quit pretending to care.

This is exactly the kind of ostracism that leads to suicides. But Ms Paperny is one of the good guys, so when her body count piles up, she’ll resume lecturing us on how societal meanness hurts everybody but the eldergays to whose deaths she contributed.

Indeed yes, Madame Paperny, you really are that pernicious.

R.M. Vaughan: Obituary

Innumerable copy errors and fuckups corrected from the original (PDF). New Brunswick is still incapable of getting its shit together.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Richard Murray Vaughan.

Born in Saint John, N.B. on March 2, 1965, Richard was the son of the late Murray and Dorothy Vaughan (Loughery). He is survived by his older brother Paul (Lorie) of Nauwigewauk; his niece Tricia Shannon (Chris) of Kingston; nephew Ryan Vaughan of Saint John; and nephew Tyler Vaughan of Moncton.

Richard was raised in Quispamsis and, during his early years, spent his summers at the family home in St. Martins. After graduating from Kennebecasis Valley High School in 1983, he attended UNB Saint John, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. After a short period of time working odd jobs in Montreal, he returned to his home province where he obtained his master’s in English from UNB Fredericton.

Richard began his professional life as an artist shortly after moving to Toronto in 1991 with the help of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, where he first found his voice as a playwright. From those humble beginnings [sic] until just days before his passing, Richard, better known as R.M. Vaughan, was a prolific contributor to Canadian arts and culture as a novelist, poet, and video artist. Richard was a well-known culture critic for the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Most recently Richard’s work brought him back to New Brunswick as Writer-in-Residence for UNB Fredericton, where he was helping to inspire the next generation of Canadian writers.

For those closest to Richard, he will be remembered for the handwritten letter and postcards, the quirky little trinkets that would arrive in the mail, and wonderful crafts he loved to make for all occasions, but especially for Hallowe’en.

Arrangements are under the care and direction of Brenan’s Funeral Home, 111 Paradise Row, Saint John. In keeping with Richard’s wishes, a private family ceremony will take place. A celebration of life for Richard will be held later; details to be announced. For those who wish, donations can be made to the R.M. Vaughan Memorial Fund, Development and Donor Relations, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, or to the New Brunswick Mental Health Association.

Recall that UNB has an endowment of $342 million and was Richard’s most recent employer, yet they’re panhandling from civilians for pennies.

Letter to UNB president

Neither University of New Brunswick president Paul Mazerolle (I went to school with a Brent Mazerolle) nor any of his functionaries bothered to respond to my postal letter of 2021.01.04 as follows:

I write to object to the low-rent and tawdry manner in which it treated a former writer-in-residence, R.M. Vaughan, and how UNB is treating Vaughan’s memory after his suicide.

That suicide was proximally caused by UNB. A press report holds that Vaughan’s writer-in-residence post lasted a paltry four months, not 12. Under the best circumstances, then, Vaughan had a third of a year’s salary to live on – then he was cast adrift. And adrift he was: Further press reports show that Vaughan got “booted” out of his apartment, then had to couch-surf with a friend (and in turn put up with that friend’s daughter).

With no income and nowhere to call home, R.M. Vaughan drowned himself. “Another eldergay successfully exterminated” is a harsh but accurate analysis, given that middle-aged gay men have spent their entire adulthoods dodging one attempted genocide after another (the closet, AIDS, and now “LGBT+”). Again, UNB is complicit in Vaughan’s death.

Now you add insult to injury by canvassing the public to contribute to a purported memorial fund. Don’t you think you should have paid R.M. Vaughan more money when he was alive, not least when he was in your employ? Isn’t UNB’s endowment worth $342 million?

Why can’t UNB put its money where Vaughan’s corpse is and contribute 250 grand or more toward a mental-health fund for middle-aged gay men? (Not “transmen.” Not females – eldergays only.) Why does everybody at UNB still get paid while the University panhandles the public for spare change? Why not do something that shows how much you want us to believe you valued R.M. Vaughan – instead of taking the lowliest course of action, which does nothing but betray how UNB really felt about him?

(Cf. TINTIN OUT OF SNOWY!) Also cf. Ben Lunato:

Stringy, scrawny, emaciated; every one of them halfway to an eating disorder; self-abnegating “fitness” obsession produces bodies they can do nothing with that they actually enjoy; harridans and drill-sergeants manqué(e)s who couldn’t squat one plate for five reps; anti-racism is always more important than getting you stronger.

(Cf. “Apple Man.” Further, in those unflattering black-and-white photographs, which no digital camera can natively capture, even the [gay] negroes have drawn, lined, prematurely wrinkled faces. Within the reality-distortion field of Apple Park’s torus, black does crack.)

Sandra Bernhard reacts to betrayal even if it isn’t there. Or so I recalled from With Nails (excerpted; oddball EMPHASIS sic):

• Sandra has invisible battle lines drawn, delineating to whom she will, or will not, speak. The room is divided decisively into Winners and LOSERS, the latter filling her larger register.

• I never really thought of RAGE as being sexual but, as displayed by Sandra, it somehow seems to be: Her frustration with the world is expressed in hyperventilating statements, and opinions are accompanied by flaring nostrils that hiss vixen-like at you. Like she might just DEVOUR you at any moment. Eyes bulging like Godzilla. Redeemed by laughter. She trips herself up with her extremism every now and again, and being with her is as close a return to the intensity of adolescence as you are likely to get. Her worship-filled passions are precisely fixed at 16. Or thereabouts!

  And the penalty of her “alchemy” is the hovering possibility that you might be cast out AT ANY MOMENT. I am a willing lamb to her sacrificial style of friendship. For I have already “heard” her bleating beneath her wolf’s clothing. She is vulnerable despite the SPITE.

• Especially as she HATES being left out and can locate a thread of “rejection” in a yard of welcomes.

• I am preoccupied with the launch of L.A. Story, which is excluding, and exclusion is one thing Sandra is probably more acutely tuned to than anything else. In fact, she is the Chairperson of the Board, her catalogue of Exclusions vastly extensive.

• Sandra Bernhard has invited me to stay with her in the San Fernando Valley, but, as all my meetings take place in L.A., I decide to stay in a hotel in the city. This does not go down well with Sandra, who is never one to take anything too lightly, and I am cast in the role of the Betrayer and Treasonite.

(“Somebody hands you a tambourine.”)

Accessibility for people with disabilities is the only non-partisan issue. Like everything they touch, it’s been systematically ruined by Silicon Valley progressives. You can put a stop to that, not least by taking the Neutrality Pledge for Accessibility Workers.

Make Accessibility Great Again.

(2020.06.28) It is extraordinarily complex to buy memory for Macintosh computers. (Give it a shot. Can you get it right on the first go?) After four visits to stores and dealers, I gave up and ordered from the ostensibly-well-reputed Newegg. The RAM manufacturer was Nexim.

The RAM, which took weeks to arrive, was defective. My Mac was in the shop twice, in the latter case for six weeks, trying to diagnose the issue. It never was diagnosed. Only when I removed the Nexim RAM, and lived with not enough memory, and then later replaced it with another manufacturer’s, did this machine work correctly.

I asked for a return and a refund. It cost 18 bucks to mail back the RAM, which, incidentally, had been shipped via postal mail in a regular padded envelope. (I used a box.) The destination was somewhere in Bumfuck, Florida, in an industrial park. (I checked Street View images.) The delivery confirmation stated the item had been left in a storage locker, implying the destination is the sort of thing one would have used as a dead drop during the Cold War.

Nexim and Newegg then proceeded to:

1. repeatedly ask for the tracking number of the package, including after it had been received

2. repeatedly pretend not to be able to read or manipulate that tracking number, despite dealing with somebody who does not top-post and avoids HTML E‑mail, and who ultimately wrote it out in military alphabet

3. issue a refund on an internal system, sent me umpteen notifications of same, then sent me a notification stating the refund had been cancelled

4. keep my money

Newegg’s CEO (it has one) was keen on informing me of its pandemic preparedness plans. Given two months to reply to two requests for comment, he did nothing.

Newegg and Nexim are fly-by-night operations. Do not spend money with them.

(I have learned through this tribulation that Apple’s unreasonable prices for memory are a good deal overall. If remotely possible, buy a machine with all the RAM you will ever need present out of the box and ordered through and installed by Apple.)