“Notes”

After the manner of B‑Links, I decided to assemble my notes from Instapaper.

October 2018

1. Tom Crewe, “Here was a plague”:

   • “Once one discovers one is gay one must choose everything, from how to walk, dress and talk to where to live, with whom and on what terms.”

   • “Negative test results were treated like suspended sentences.” (Cf. Walt Odets.)

   • “at least we no longer need to be relentlessly witty or elegant”

2. Steve Sailer on testosterone: “As an opinion journalist, for instance, I have to compete with Androgel Andrew Sullivan[.]”

3. Camille Paglia: “I’m very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.”

   Also: “I think the sliding in the mud at Woodstock was this kind of sensory self-pleasuring that I’m talking about…. I began to see the degree to which my ’60s energy, my yippie energy and so on, my prankishness, was draining the energy of people who had actual important life concerns.”

4. Alexandra Kitty: “The Internet has done a very interesting thing: it has bypassed having to destroy the middle class to create the same anger.”

5. The late Mark Merlis: “the way young gay boys have their very bodies stolen from them… the way he seemed at home in his body in a way I could never be.”

   Merlis was the author of Top 5 gay novel An Arrow’s Flight, quoted here on many occasions:

   It was into this parody of domestic life that Pyrrus was born; in it he lived his formative years. If there are such years, if we aren’t pretty much formed by the time we see light. For example: If Pyrrhus wasn’t born a sissy, he certainly was one by the time his father first playfully wrestled with him, when he was two or three. He cried when real boys were supposed to laugh; he ran away from frogs and even butterflies; if you threw a ball at him he covered his face with his hands instead of trying to catch it. There are fathers who try to remedy this: “At-ten-hut! We will play catch now!” All they get is sons like Leucon, who nurse permanent grievances and still can’t catch.

March 2018

• The Littlest Hobo: “A dog who travelled around from town to town paying off crew mortgages”

• Fran Lebowitz (sic):

  So, it would be really a wonderful thing if Americans would learn their own language. Instead of the people who speak it the worst are the people who are like, really worried about the people who are from other countries.

• Every Frame a Painting postmortem:

  The big danger for future video essayists is that large Web sites have started moving away from the written word and towards video, which is completely unsustainable. Video is just too expensive and time-consuming to make.

• Armond White on Call Me by Your Name:

  Elio, a skinny kid with a heart-shaped face, is a piano prodigy who prefers classical music to teenage pop; he begins his seduction of grad student Oliver, who looks like a country club’s tall carefree tennis pro, by competing with him intellectually. It’s a discreet version of pulling a schoolgirl’s pigtails, courtesy of the screenplay by James Ivory, director of the pompous literary adaptations A Room with a View, Maurice, and Howards End.

  Ivory’s own cachet – an old-fashioned refinement of lust – disguises what is, essentially, Guadagnino’s porno-chic. (The film feels like a flashback but isn’t. By making Elio so precocious yet intense, with none of the usual adolescent banality, Guadagnino reveals he is more than a little in love with the memory of being jailbait.)

  (White’s best capitalization: “THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE CONCENTRATION, IMMENSITY AND INTENSITY OF THE BIG-SCREEN MOVIE EXPERIENCE”)

• Liz Smith:

  “It’s just the diminution of your name,” she said. “It’s a natural thing to happen. So I began to be forgotten[.]”

• “Oscar to Suicide in One Year”: “Fame is experienced as an impact, like a car crash”

• “How the straight majority still silences gay people”:

  The current situation feels as if an exasperated majority is telling us that we have been given a generous legal framework. We used to insist on your silence; these days, we’ve kindly ensured that there is no reason for you to speak up. That’s an improvement, isn’t it? Now go away. Shut up. Listen to our explanations of your existence. Watch the licensed floats of gay-friendly insurance companies go by from behind the barrier. And be as grateful as I tell you to be.

• Duncan Roy:

  There was a moment when he was totally naked in front of me, shamelessly changing out of his swim costume. Looking at me, his piercing green eyes. He was gifting me a lifetime of memories.

• Tyler Brûlé (and I definitely side with him):

  In February, he wrote in “The Fast Lane” about a badly behaved couple – in business class, obviously – on a KLM flight to Amsterdam. One of the flight attendants accidentally spilt milk on the man’s jacket. Screams about lawsuits ensued. Brûlé offered the attendant his card. (“ ‘If you need a witness when you’re taken to court over spilled milk on a blazer,’ ” I said, with a wink, “ ‘please let me know.’ ”) […]

  “Our friends on the plane were beastly South Africans.” In the following week’s column, he’d corrected the “many” readers who’d assumed the couple were American. He says he’s had “big fights” with the FT when he’s mentioned nationalities and they’ve pulled the reference: “I’ve rung up and said, ‘That’s the whole point, that they’re Chinese or Russian, and now it’s neutered.’ It’s entertainment.”

• North Morgan (not his real name): “they prefer their homosexual banter safe, hetero, and leading nowhere.” (Also “I’m afraid I don’t know enough about this demographic to write about it in a derogatory manner, like I do with white bros, scene gays, and Greeks”)

• Adam Baran:

  There were two branches to male stripping: “the perfect gentleman,” which was [Henry E.] Dixey, and “man as sexual animal,” which was what Sandow was.

• What Rolling Stone, dependable as ever, describes as “hipster Nazis”:

  In February, Tim and Kevin started Balaclava Kueche, Germany’s first Nazi vegan cooking show. In each episode, the two chatty, fast-talking men wear facemasks and earnestly explain to viewers how to make an array of vegan dishes (the first episode: mixed salad, tofu scramble). “The left-wing doesn’t have a prior claim to veganism,” says Tim. “Industrial meat production is incompatible with our nationalist and socialist world views.”

  (Also “the antifa furry movement”)

• “Lamenting the Lack of Gay Comedians”:

  “You only get to be important at a gay bar if you are super hot or you have tucked your genitals inside of a cavity in your body to say ‘I am a referee in this game; I am no longer a player.’ ”

  That was by Guy Branum, an oversensitive boor (both at once) who breathily expressed girlish admiration for Maggie Thatcher and blocked me when I told him “LGBT” wasn’t real

• “Transgender activists ‘transjack’ popular speedrunning event for gamers”:

  Video game fans of speedrunning are complaining that their favorite event of the year was “transjacked” by an influx of autogynephilic transgender incels.

• Question: “Do you prefer Diet Coke or Cis-Coke?”

• Mark Steyn: “[I]t’s totally cisgenderist to suggest you can’t be a woman if you’re hung like a horse”

• Michael Wolff: “Twitter waits for the unschooled to speak, then it mugs them”

• E‑books (not “ebooks,” “Ebooks,” or “eBooks,” and you need a nonbreaking hyphen):

  Pre-digital people had a single “self” and they hauled its sorry ass through the pages of the literary canon in the hope that it would come out better. Digital people have multiple selves, and so what they are doing with an immersive story is more provisional and temporary.

• Dougie Coupland, a drunk (now drying out) whose boyfriend left him: “Until recently Greeks were able to spend their days doing nothing, which was nice; now they have to spend their days with nothing to do, which is scary”

• Zeldman (“Give me file hierarchies, or give me chaos”): “When it’s time to get dressed in the morning, I don’t throw myself into a giant room full of clothes”

• L. DeLaria:

  I was the first openly gay comic to perform on television in America. It was The Arsenio Hall Show, 1993. I entered the stage screaming, “Hello, everybody! It’s the 1990s. It’s hip to be queer and I’m a BIIIG DYKE!” This was an unheard-of admission at the time, and it propelled me into an exotic world of agents, managers, People magazine, European tours and, of course, acting.

  The roles I was given were usually comical in nature and strictly kept with in the confines of that box marked “lesbian” in which Hollywood had enclosed me. In other words, I played a lot of P.E. teachers and police lieutenants. I also portrayed THE LESBIAN WHO INAPPROPRIATELY HITS ON STRAIGHT WOMEN AT EVERY FUNCTION.

  In fact, that was my niche – because, at that time, it was difficult for producers, directors, writers, etc. to see me as anything but “the Lesbian.” Unless, of course, “the Lesbian” was a lead, [in which case] the part went to Gina Gershon.

• “Livestock is an outdated technology”

• Computer security:

  One of the hardest parts of communication security is often getting correspondents who are at personally lower risk to take the same countermeasures to protect message confidentiality that the more motivated half of the conversation wants to use.

• Not Dilbert: “In our minds, Clinton went from being a stylish and energetic personality to a hospice patient dressed like a North Korean dictator at a rave”

• “8Cr13MoV is why you don’t let engineers name things”

• Gay softball: “who had trouble keeping himself tucked into his cut-offs, necessitating constant re-arrangement, to our amusement”

• “vs. its facility to induce ‘bone-crushing erections’ ”

• “So can you talk a little bit about the evolution of haircuts over the decades? Because haircuts are very important to lesbians”

• Vicious:

  “If someone wants to do an entertaining, compelling show about a bunch of gay guys who act like alpha males, no one’s stopping you from doing that,” he said. “Go do a Web series and tweet me the link. I’ll gladly retweet it”

• N. Jonas: “But I think when I came into my body, you know, and started building muscle and realizing that in a lot of ways physically I had become a man, that’s when I became comfortable and confident.” (“My lips”)

• Ruggerses: “Being gay and being strong are powerful forces the world needs”

(Posted: 2018.03.15. Updated: 2018.10.04.)