Tuesday, August 28, 2018

But Wait!




.
If things happened
as strangely
.
as they do in dreams,
would the unbelievable
.
begin to be believed?
Could in some manner
.
any understanding
be achieved?
.
Would I be able somehow
to clue into you?
.
If things happened
as strangely
.
as they do in dreams –
but wait!
.
What could I mean?
They do.
.
.


Thursday, August 23, 2018

C’mon baby, show ‘em



.
There’s a poem in here and they know it.
Though experience tells them I’ll blow it.
(Six or seven times.) Every last thing is a poem.
Especially this: it rhymes! C’mon baby, show ‘em.
.
Catch the form and pay the fee.
This one’s a composite-of-ghost-faces tree.
Produits de l’esprit et l’imagination en français.
Deux têtes dans le feu*, the rest held at bay.
.
I don’t know how much is resistance
and how much amounts to persistence
in wanting to barge through to tantalize.
Ambiguities easily paralyze.
.
But ambivalences have a chance.
Though often as not they will split your hot pants
at least you’ll have something to show.
The vagina may smile but the penis won’t grow.
.
Poems aren’t sex, you know.
.
.
*products of the mind and the imagination in French.
Two heads in the fire.
.
.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Love the Play, Be the Play



.
As witty as she’s pretty, she’s who every lady
in a gentlewoman’s novel wants to be. Parsing out
the delicacies of her watchful sensibilities and luck,
.
without of course in any way broadcasting her advance,
she’s found she is the central presence with whom
every man must dance. She chooses confidants
.
and confidences with an almost playful sense
of mild unguarded ease – a touch of tease –
and yet a breath, though never taken heavily,
.
that something more than nothing may well be
at stake. She is the cake and they are eating it
and she is eating it: there always will be more. Ears
.
she favors with her secrets are both known to be
deserving, and deserving. Perhaps this sounds
self-serving: as if her main pursuit resides in publicly
.
performing her appeal: ministering only to the very
knowing, deeper minds, more handsome brows –
those gentlemen who have a feel for depth and value
.
and who can’t not fall in love with every ripple
of her surreptitious sense of the absurd – so fresh
with laughter! – touched with nearly negligible sighs.
.
This is neither solipsistic nor unwise. Wondrous things
get said in bed with human treats as fully formed
and sweet as she. Play it to the hilt, my dear: release
.
your talent for the balances of volupté and every
elegant, sharp, brilliant bit of evidence you have  
amassed of what you’re more than certain
.
is persuasive re: the wars of soul and class
in Proust. Perhaps assume a looser stance
onstage today. Love the play. Be the play.
.

Monday, August 20, 2018

Yes, We are Green



.
.
Cheerleader, linebacker, honor society:
Marge was voluptuous, Lars smoked cigars –
Innocence’ blush next to blunt Notoriety -
Blundun High’s brightest and sexiest stars.
.
“Wedding bells soon!” opined Reverend Clarence –
So when the news came, were we taken aback
to learn, with the blessings of all of their parents,
Lars now was Lacey, and Marge was now Mack.
.
“I was he, now I’m she,” giggled Lars-become-Lacey.
“Try it sometime,” grunted Mack-who’d-been-Marge.
They both flushed hot pink. “Now everything’s racy.
Large things get smaller, and small things get large.”
.
Mack, suddenly solemn, said: “Yes, we are green.
Some biochemists say green can make legible
something impelling our systems may mean
us to do. To morph flesh into vegetable.”
.
Lacey’s never solemn: “What fun, one thinks!
To make the ineffable loop”
(Lacey excitedly blinks)
“to salaciously savory vegetable soup!”
.
.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Perhaps the Longest Sentence E'er Writ.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9PtrQiKG-A
.
What we see here is something for which a reasonable claim can be made that a sufficient massing of graffiti which began as what was then regarded vandalism has over years amassed such a density of interesting effects that it becomes not only pleasing as decoration but gratifying in the way art gratifies – by conveying through its massed implications something of the poetic suggestion whereby we identify art, a condition with which this very sentence has striven over this moment of "now" you are watching it unfold, to pack and unpack its contents with what its writer hopes is the same tumbling grace that seems randomly to have helped transmute the graffiti into its current exalted aesthetic state, thereby to demonstrate and reveal, as if reenacting the stages of it before our very eyes, an evolving identity, kindred to the transformation of graffiti in these images, which find their corollary in this sentence which celebrates them, which may be showing itself to be submitting to not dissimilar vagaries of unlooked-for influence, effectively dismantling the fences barring its way to the condition of art by slowly amassing its own inimitable density of effect; and indeed on the strength of which it shall henceforth now, it thinks not without having made a persuasive case for it, claim that same exalted aesthetic status for itself – ever knowing it will be readily identified as such by any acutely observant critic who has watched it form into lyric flow while at the same time evince a strict adherence to the bone-laws of grammar, syntax and diction, to produce this last confession of purpose and method and hope (venturing to call itself certainty) with which it now ends its discourse to await the award in the form of what it imagines will have to be at least the equivalent of a pretty little gold medal featuring the holy word itself – to lie bare on its verbally hirsute chest:          ART.



.......................................................................................................................................................

Friday, August 17, 2018

Ginger Brigade



.
The day would be made when, like three musketeers,
the trio comprising the Ginger Brigade would amass
the good will of their kinsmen and peers: hear the cheers
.
their parade to their run down on Plum Street in Blundon
evinced from the crowd – where they’d trundle and glide
every Whitsuntide, Monday and Sunday and Mrs. Dunn’s
.
Bun Day, begun by the mum of each one of the three in
the run, her sons Dunstan and Runnel and Gunnar. Ginger-
haired well-behaved boys, they never made very much noise:
.
no clatter or din would arise from their quietly pattering feet
on the pavement; the crowd would grow still, and that quiet
would one day be why they would all be undone in a spill
.
and a splat. One Monday a semi careened round and hit them
head on and kaboshed them to mud. Their flattened remains
and the swamp of their blood were bright ginger. Red hair
.
has been banned ever since in the land of glum Blundun.
Mrs. Dunn stopped at once baking buns. Like everything else
God has done, slow or fast, the Ginger Brigade didn’t last.
.
.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

AngelChicken



.
Somewhere between a chicken and an angel,
genetically she’d never been in sync –
had she dropped into this being via eggshell –
or from some celestial eye in a blink?
.
The odd celestial eye, that is, afflicted with a stye.
She doesn’t know. No record of her birth.
She sports innumerable wings. None help her fly.
Her feathers keep her warm. But life on Earth,
.
she’s learned, is not particularly more ridiculous
for creatures without evidence of purpose
than it is for more presumably felicitous
inhabitants like us who polish up our surface
.
thinking that’s how to proclaim what we’re about.
AngelChicken has accepted she’s a blip,
no more impossible than we, she has no doubt.
Like Plato made of play-dough. Or a pancake flip.
.

Monday, August 13, 2018

Mum's the Word



.
First thought when he wakes in his bed.
He recalls his whole family is dead.
He rummages ‘round in his head to think
what he might think up instead to give
.
some kind of mass to the zero that dead is.
What is the aim of the scheme?
Here’s what the dream is he wakes from.
It’s eternally raining in August. He thinks
.
it is morning but grayness could be
any of time of the day not yet night.
He walks his two canine but human-faced
pets who entangle themselves in his limbs
.
every time they go out and get wet:
he never wears more than his underwear.
He can feel his face scowl but he can’t
feel what it might be scowling about.
.
This isn’t what life is like, of course. This is
what life really is. He eschews metaphor
but enjoys using simile: likes “neat as a pin”
most of all. He savors its subversiveness:  
.
that such a small sleek straight sharp point
should be able so neatly to puncture the flesh,
spill the blood, even kill – more deadly than
such a small thing ought to be – and that
.
this should wrest out the essence of “neat” –
surely no other words bore such replete
simulacra of actual thing. “Neat as a pin”
was as close as four words could become,
.
even bring you, to what to believe. Yet
like the words death, father, son, mum
and brother, at last they deceive and they
numb. Mum’s the word. Every word’s mum.
.

Friday, August 10, 2018

BirdCat and the Psychoanalyst


.
Red of face and blue of hair,
with his pet BirdCat always there,
both patently identifiably themselves,
diving down at me like flying elves,
.
Psychoanalyst Juan Van der Wiesen
will not otherwise supply a reason
for returning than to say “it’s me!” –
stating something I can plainly see.
.
He then scrutinizes me for evidence
I had not realized (or not disguised)
that I am still alarmingly unwell.
That is generally when I hear the bell
.
on BirdCat’s yellow neck ring twice:
two shakes of it warn “Now, be nice!”
because he knows if I am not,
poor BirdCat will be in a spot:
.
Juan Van Der Wiesen will not leave
until he sees I ardently believe
in his prodigious diagnostic power.
If instead, as has occurred, I glower
.
at him for his rank ineptitude,
BirdCat will start to cry for food
which he will not be fed
until I have vociferously led
.
the analyst to understand I think
he’s diagnosed the missing link
to why I am a rank ungodly mess.
BirdCat can’t eat till I confess.
.
But that’s not what I did today.
Right through their fraudulent display,
I said I saw: “I know you don’t exist!”
I whisked them out of sight like mist –
.
a whoosh! – and that was that.
But I admit I miss BirdCat.
I cried before I went to bed:
I’m why he never did get fed.
.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Figured It Out



.
They sniggered at doubt
and figured it out.
Or rather the one who
.
began it all did.
The one who first
realized nothing was hid.
.
You mean you discovered
the one who began it?
Oh, not just the one
.
who began it but ran it.
The one who had figured
out everything everywhere
.
all had been made
of the same exact thing.
Once you knew that,
.
you could render yourself
into continents, taffy
or rhinestony bling.
.
Or bring forth a family
and pet from your thigh
on a string. He walks

around now congregating
new pow-pows he summons
from somewhere where
.
nobody ever learned
take doesn’t also
mean bring.
.
.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

When This Poem Began


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp8rqvWhzF4
.
Consummation – 
devoutly to be wished – 
this slippery evasion: 
to let the yearning be 
its own reward – 
.
less grasping-after 
than a moving-toward! –
No, that's not what 
it wanted to be.
When this poem began
.
like Pinocchio
to turn from an 'it' to a 'he',
I was tempted to trade it
for something more 
neatly aligned with
.
my own kind of poetry.
But then it reminded me:
"I am a pilgrim! And I tread
my own road to joy."
It's a good little boy.
.
If you see he’s paraded
down roads on my dare
which he took 
that he’d get to that joy,
let me know if he made it.
.

.

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Unlike



.
To see things in the light you can’t not see them in,
he looks unlike. Unlike.
He is unlike what you once thought was common sense.
He is unlike what you once thought was egotism.
He is unlike what you once thought was truth. Ruthlessly

invested in a vision he can see, and sometimes you can see,
and at those moments all his haute Parisian haughtiness
appears to be integrity. That he’s sure he will move
mountains horrifies. The world sends out its spies
to undermine this sort of enterprise.
.
What’s the gold you know is at the center of his soul?
It is true gold, not the gold Johannesburg supplies for bling,
and not the metaphoric thing a humane heart is said to be,
no golden quality of kind attentive empathy, no gold
you’ve ever touched or worn or understood.
.
He’s got that gold. I saw it in him instantly.
When he saw I saw it he returned the blasted thing to me.
“C’est pas a moi. C’est a toi,” il dit.
It’s not his, it’s mine. I’ve never seen Reality.
Truths may not be things that shine.
.

.

Saturday, August 4, 2018

Meaning of Summer


.
Particle or wave – tsunami –
snapshot of infinity – motionless
surprise – photographed: forever
delicately startled eyes – or some yelp
rushing, blasting with such force
and speed there is no help for it:
.
looking through the summer’s
crystal lens – exacting point-of-view –
I can’t see anything held back: nothing
hasn’t been set out, arrayed for me
to see: nobody is covering the truth:
everything is everywhere, on top,
.
upfront; the surface holds whatever
key that there could be: I’m as much
the sea as sea, or sky as sky:
all there brimming in the eye.
I saw a pretty mother push an empty
pram meticulously up a sidewalk –
.
West End Avenue – followed by
a very little girl, presumably her daughter,
pushing her toy empty pram as well.
Memory has turned them into water –
glass: absent and eternal. Every image
passes, laughs, tinkles like a bell.
.
.

Guy's Return to Grey Gardens - Hole in the Wonder Bread, 16 years later



 Guy’s Return to Grey Gardens –
.
Had reason to disinter my piece on Grey Gardens - in touch again with a brilliant cherished friend Betsy Beckmann who’s now living in San Antonio and has joined forces with her mother working in a family business ‘cackling together like the two Edie's in Grey Gardens’. This brought back the context in 2002 of my life with my own mother - and the unexpected occasion it afforded to write my Grey Gardens piece. As I explained it to Betsy:
.
When my life imploded, which I suppose one must say it did back in January 2002 when I left Nyc tail between legs to live with my mother in Amityville Long Island, it turned out to be a golden oasis. I was sentient and dimensionally alive enough to actually really BE with my mother who I did not then have any suspicion would be dead in a year and a half at the age of 85 of congestive heart failure — but whom in that calendar year of 2002 I grew to know as a friend in absolutely unexpected ways. She was a beautiful woman, an accomplished water color artist who sat down in fact to paint every afternoon of her life including that year and from whom I caught the bug of what Auden I think called ‘the habit of art.’ Anyway we became a kind of working unit during that year, I went back (I was then 51) to my kid chores of shoveling snow ----


.... and weeding the grounds and mowing the lawn and raking the leaves and discovering that my mother was incredibly smart and funny (which she also found me to be: our dna was aligned: we both laughed at the same stuff etc): kind of us not against the world but creating a new one and liking it. My father had died of/with Alzheimer’s in 2000, my episcopal priest brother of AIDS in 1989, so we were kind of it and oh it was fun! Anyway, at the beginning of my tenure there someone who’d read my book Dancing Around the Volcano about gay men & sex contacted me from Seattle and, praising my writing (How to Make a Writer Fall in Love with You: praise his book), asked me if I would be willing to write a piece on Grey Gardens for which he’d not long before hatched a fan site. I said fuck yeah! & procured a vhs tape of it from the Amityville library and watched it 4 times and wrote this little bit of business. Truth to tell my life with my mother had less outward wackadoobydoo in it than the Edies but our love and off to the side experience of pretty much everything made for a sweet context in which to dive into what came out. Hope you enjoy it!
   

Hole in the Wonder Bread   
 


To Grey Gardens fans, 2002 will forever be significant for one reason: the passing, at 84, in Bal Harbour, Florida, on January 14, of Edie Beale -- one year after the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the film that she said was for her and her mama 'a breakthrough to something beautiful and precious called life.'
.
Author Guy Kettelhack here scratches his head over Edie's and GG's impact on us all...
=================================================================
       "Raccoons and cats become a little bit boring," sighs Edie Beale towards the end of Grey Gardens. "I mean for too long a time."
.
       By the time she utters this, Ms. Beale has made so many pronouncements, most of them of a completely equal lack of portent, that I'm surprised I notice this one. But the animals, yes -- something about the animals. All I can tell her, and I do, continuing an unwitting policy of talking at the TV screen that I began during my fourth viewing of the film -- all I can tell her is, "Edie honey, they haven't started to bore me." It amazes me, sort of, that they haven't, but they haven't.
.
       I have now watched Grey Gardens four times. I'd seen it when it first came out in the mid-70s when I was a 20-something ultra-sophisticate (I was so sophisticated back then! Seems like I've regressed in sophistication every year since, to the point where now I feel about five naïve years old) -- feeling jaded in the relatively fresh wake (for me) of Fellini, Godard, and Warhol (Paul Morrissey) flicks, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a general pot-saturated anything-goes gestalt that made One Think One Had Seen and Done It All. All I remember of the film from that time (a vagueness surely partly the product of having been, like everyone else who saw it with me, stoned) was that Edie and her mom were a campy holiday,
.
.
and who'd-a-thunk their cousin Mrs. (you had to remember not to call her Kennedy) Onassis would have had anything to do with them. I remember the news clips about Jackie saving the Hamptons house from being condemned, and my mother tut-tutting over the scandal of it.
.
       These were the days when Liz Smith was reporting on parties at The Anvil (Avis to the Hertz of The Mineshaft) in her gossip column and coke spoons floated down from the ceiling at Studio 54 to hit Liza, Marisa and Truman on their heads. There were something like twelve gay bathhouses in New York City -- and one straight one. I, hip thang that I was, therefore did not tut-tut at the Beales. (I don't think I knew how to tut-tut.) They induced in me one of my insouciant ironic 20-something aren't-they-a-hoot hmmphs. In fact, that's what it all was -- the "scandal," the movie, the time: a hoot. Grey Gardens fit perfectly into the mid-70s version of po-mo. Ya hadda love Edie, maybe, but you forgot about her the morning after. Or I did.
.
       The prospect of seeing the film again after nearly thirty years was not alluring. Hearing from an acquaintance that she'd recently died -- a publicist who had known Edie on and off since the '70s and emailed me with the idea of maybe doing a book about her -- left me surprised to hear that Edie hadn't died already. Edie Beale was no Ruth Draper (fantastically witty lady from ancient times who did incredible monologues) or Tallulah B: I mean, it was the Maysle brothers who'd managed somehow to bring her the little glimmer of fame she'd enjoyed -- not (I thought) any specially intrinsic compelling interest in the loopy lady herself. (Who'd heard of her since the '70s?) And my vague memory of the Maysle brothers' arty camera angles and bleak cinema verite (all those house eaves, close-ups of Big Edie's decaying splay of breast tissue, little Edie's wrapped bald head and badly made-up face, hungry cats and dirty tin cans)
.
.
would, I thought, now surely seem dated and strained. So I sighed when I shoved in the VHS GG tape to watch it again.
.
       And then proceeded to spend whatever time the thing took to play gaping at the screen, hands limp and dangling between my knees.
.
       "Oh, it's a sea of leaves. If you lose something you can't find it again. It drops to the bottom…"
.
.
       The thing was an amazing slow psychic train wreck that never quite entirely wrecked. A surreal sleight-of-hand turning nothing into -- well, visual nothing. It spooked me. Edie's lunatic confidences & scarves & flesh & animals & old eerie debutante photographs all seemed like broken shards of a psyche gaily tossing itself bit by bit into psychosis. I looked for something, anything to guide, ground me. Some sane Dorothy in Oz, someone to reassure me I wouldn't lose my own mind if I spent too much time with these people. But there was no one reliable enough for that. Big Mama Edie sometimes helped out a bit (kind of like the Red Queen when for a brief moment here or there she says something congruent to Alice and seduces her, falsely, into thinking she's not in hell) -- by contrast to the imploding people and house surrounding her she seemed to offer an iota or two of clear-eyed commentary -- but basically it was a coupla nut jobs flopping around and breaking down happily in front of us. My dangling palms began to sweat. "When am I gonna get out of here?" Edie asked in one of her many frazzled moments. I wondered the same thing.
.
       It wasn't so much that these ladies needed help -- I was beginning to feel like I did. Blurry memories of the few years I'd spent at shrink school came back -- my psychoanalytic institute's collective assertion that you had to be real wary working with schizophrenics because they were very canny people and after a while, if you weren't careful with your counter-transference, they might suck you into ending up as cracked as they were. I remembered Freud's "economic" theory of the mind -- his idea of a "preconscious" gatekeeper keeping the crazy lunatics in the asylum of the Unconscious at bay on the left, letting in only those lunatics that the better-behaved Conscious city of The (comparatively) Sane wanted him to let in and could accommodate on the right. The Maysles were clearly the gate-keepers -- that single deadpan reflection of them with their handheld video equipment in a Grey Garden mirror certainly revealed them at their gate-keeping work. Only what sides of the gate were we, they and the two Edies on? The asylum's fumes had leaked out all over the place: id was seeping in like immanent mildew; the Bastille had long been stormed. I wondered (as my hair prickled while little Edie conspiratorially whispered: "What I felt was in the cards, the Marble Faun moving in – he just gave us a washing machine -- that cements the deal -- I can't spend the rest of my life washing clothes -- I'm pulverized by this latest thing") what heavy medication all these schizoid symptoms, looked up in the DSM4, might have indicated. (Arrgh!) Sodium Pentathol maybe, or Haldol? (Shrinks, help me!)
.
       My second time at Grey Gardens, in other words, freaked the effing hiccups out of me.
.
       "Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono & we had quite a fight…"
.
       Then, not long after, I saw it a third time. My courage and determination to do so somehow revived. Maybe I was just in a better mood. I'd eaten something good for dinner, I was relaxed, I was more willing to watch the Edies play without anticipating wanting to tie several of little Edie's scarves around their alternately fluty and shrieking throats. So I watched it again, and it was as if I'd never seen it before. Instead of a movie about nothing, it seemed to be a movie about everything. The lines (which for some reason I just hadn't noticed, much less savored, before) I now found myself compulsively scribbling down on scrap paper. Everything that popped out of their mouths seemed symbolically rich. The movie -- which had formerly seemed so bleak, unpeopled and barren -- now featured a cast of thousands. The cats were like a Greek chorus on a night off -- Big Mama Edie's breasts and straw hats were like separate characters in a play of their own. I hooted for real now, and it didn't take being stoned to feel delight: "Do you think my costume looked all right to Brooks? I think he was a little amazed."
.
       I was more than a little amazed. The Marble Faun, for instance -- what a wonderfully wackily apt metaphor, that precious Hawthorne story about a beautiful naïve Italian boy, as sensual as the Praxiteles statue after which he was named, falling like Adam into sin: lunky handyboy Jerry as the Praxitelean stand-in, chosen for the part as if Edie were Blanche DuBois, determined to see romance in the squalid. This was source material for Tennessee Williams.
.
.
The birthday party was out of Dickens. The faded portraits of the Beale women captured an almost Jamesian beauty: there was drama and mystery here (how did then become now?), along with the comedy (how did then become now?). "She likes everything without girdles," Edie confides about her mother -- equally descriptive of the whole Maysle/Beale enterprise.
.
       Sure, the ladies -- especially "good little daughter" Edie -- ladled on labile emotions right out of some abnormal psychology text, but it all seemed to flow with real purpose from beginning to end -- an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza more gratifying than Moulin Rouge. "I have to think these things up," Edie tells us about her sweater skirt outfits and brightly swathed skull -- a bozo bravado that the Maysles simply, brilliantly allowed to erupt out of her, up and down stairs, in and out of bed, back and forth between the ocean and the beach. (The tears welling up in Mama Edith's eyes as she listens to Norman Vincent Peale on their little robin's egg blue radio prod his audience to look into a mirror and ask themselves "Who am I?") And Edie swam so well.
.
       In other words, I liked it. It was growing on me. Unsettling thoughts of schizophrenia no longer plagued me. The last frames -- Edie dancing in filmy black -- seemed like a brave vindication of all slightly off-kilter women. Zelda Fitzgerald would have understood -- and joined in the dance.
.
       "Who's been dropping books around here is what I want to know."
.
       Then I watched it a fourth time.
.
       The context now was, it was early morning and I'd drunk a lot of coffee. I mean a lot. I'd had three deadlines to meet (the happiest of which was writing this piece), and I guess I hoped the caffeine would goose me into overdrive: prod me into the quick progress and completion of my appointed tasks. What the coffee goosed me into, however (and repeatedly), was the bathroom. I wanted one last taste of Edie before I had to return the tape to my local library -- one day more and it would be overdue -- and this was the only time I had to lap said taste up. So, en route back and forth to the toilet to pee, the Edies performed their lives for me again. Which meant I heard them from afar (falling piss added a nice little plashy soundtrack) as much as watched them on the screen when I returned to my bedroom.
.
       It was the coziest experience. Big Mama's voice calling from her bed (or was it mine?), squealing for her daughter (while Edie mused in her "decorated" room, attempting to affix that silver mask to the painted plaster, "I can't get the thumb tack in the wall -- I've got the saddest life") seemed to be squealing for me, too.
.
.
I sat back down on my bed and rejoined them at now familiar times -- seeming to walk in and out of the same rooms they entered and exited, all of us following our easy whims and urgencies, confiding to each other as we glided by. I was part of the Beale family! "We come like water and we go like wind," Edie recited from what she'd once lettered onto the wall of that private little room -- there was a real but gentle poignancy now to her off-hand little mots. Funny sweet nothings you half-listen to from a dear eccentric friend: "I want to hang the bird cage, but I haven't gotten to that." (Yes, it's hard to get to everything you want to do, Edie. We know what that's like.) Overhearing Mama Edith at her birthday party -- talking graciously on the phone, praising her "beautiful" cake -- ah, there's nothing to be afraid of in this house. Just have to go with the loopy flow.
.
       "Let the kitties in. Give them luncheon."
.
       "Are you absolutely crazy? There isn't anything I can't do," Edie says before she launches into an American-flagged marching dance to the strains of a Virginia Military Institute Band record. Suddenly I want to believe her. And I think her audience of animals already does -- that warm-blooded Greek chorus lolling about in the wings, waiting for a cue. The raccoon scaling the wall back to the attic with a slice of Wonder Bread, neatly eaten out from the center, so that only an empty square frame of crust dangles from its meticulous little mouth. The single sparrow the Maysles' camera focuses on at the very top of one of Grey Garden's highest peaks. The cats, sleeping or shitting or pleading wide-eyed for luncheon. Liver pate and cat food: makes me wonder, how different is what sustains you, Mme & Mademoiselle Beale, from what sustains your cats -- and us?
.
       Life may turn out not to be so bad in the lunatic asylum.
.
       Of course, I may think differently when I see Grey Gardens for the fifth time.
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Guy Kettelhack has contributed to, authored or co-authored more than thirty nonfiction books, including Dancing Around the Volcano -- Decoding the Enigma of Gay Men and Sex: Freeing Our Erotic Lives.

Guy's authority is varied, and enthusiastic: He has been frequently interviewed (and written) about Quentin Crisp, and speaking appearances have ranged from a talk at Middlebury College about "alcoholism, recovery and the college student," to a presentation as part of the Sexuality Series at New York's Lesbian and Gay Center (topic: "Why Does That Turn Me on? The Iconography of Sexual Fantasy) in which he appeared in jockstrap, black leather jacket, playing Czardas on the violin -- to demonstrate one of his animating premises, expressed in E.M. Forster's famous line: "Only connect".

A graduate of Middlebury College, he has done graduate work in English literature at the Bread Loaf School of English and Oxford University, graduate work in psychoanalysis at the New York and Boston Centers for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and studied violin at the Juilliard School of Music and New England Conservatory. Mr. Kettelhack lives in New York City.

Email the author: GuyBlakeKett@aol.com


© 2007 Guy Kettelhack and Nightcharm, Inc. All rights reserved
All screencaps within text by David K.
Graphic design © 2007 Nightcharm, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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