Ernest Dowson and Hart Crane would both get drunk every night and usually become violent & almost insane (24th April 2006)

Ernest Dowson and Hart Crane would both get drunk every night, and usually become violent & almost insane. I am driving myself almost to insanity every night at the Flying Scotsman. So where are my poems? Try to get into the habit of going to the Scotsman just once a week, and never again on a Saturday. If I go just once a week, then I can also go into Soho afterwards, for Sunset Strip, Sunset Cinema and maybe Pamela as well. The other two days off I will concentrate on staying and writing through the night.

I always love seeing Pamela. How good it felt to be in Sunset Cinema going up & down stairs between the two cinemas with my big swollen sore cock rolling inside my trousers. The sexual charge in those places is fantastic, and now summer is coming there may be more chance of finding some girls in there, too. All artists have to throw themselves into the gutter. Face it the greatest memories of my life have come in the Astral Cinema, the Soho Cinema, and the Sunset Cinema. All the incredible hot erotic memories from those places! I drink to derange my senses & go into the dream world. From there I can go back to Soho and the Sunset Cinema. Just imagine if the Flying Scotsman did private dances as well! Thank God they do not! There is something glorious in my drunken stupidities at the Scotsman. But please–once a week! Then I will allow myself Sunset Cinema as well. Like Hart Crane cruising the violent & dangerous Brooklyn, Manhattan & Hoboken shorefronts I cannot help but going back into Soho cinemas, despite the shame & ignominy & ruin it brings on myself–because the highs are so great & so exciting! 

“…All the couples part abruptly and pull up their trousers. That’s the flâneur, caught in the spotlight, blushing perhaps but with a wry smile playing around his lips. This, at least, is Edmund White’s kind of flâneur , cruising for sex while a few yards away tourists are paying through the nose for grim dinner-dancing experiences as they float along the Seine. When White lived in Paris between 1983 and 1998, he quickly found the best places to cruise. The Palais Royal and the Tuileries gardens (especially the gravel walkways by the Orangerie) sound like delightful places for outdoor sex, though why he thought the quay near Gare d’Austerlitz would be is, frankly, beyond me. He writes: “Most people, straight or gay, think that cruising is pathetic or sordid – but for me, at least, some of my happiest moments have been spent making love to a stranger beside dark, swiftly moving water below a glowing city.” Paris: city of light, but better, city of darkness and anonymous sex. White maintains, not very convincingly and rather half-heartedly, that cruising is an extension or application of the art of the flâneur. Those practitioners and theoreticians of the art, Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, wouldn’t have had much time for that idea, and nor should we. The whole point about a flâneur is that he or she is an aimless stroller. By contrast, a cruiser is utterly directed, as Schopenhauer might have put it, towards the extinction of his desire. The flâneur's desire is much less ardent, perhaps approaching non-existence, and thus resembles the disinterested appreciation that Kant argued was characteristic of aesthetic experience.”

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I like getting wilder & wilder. Audit Day today. The —— is going to be audited. I am going to get caned. Infernal’s From Paris to Berlin is No.4 in the charts! Reminding me so much of my travels. Also the Out of Touch, Out of Time video in the Calcutta. I love the excitement of travel. IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS I HAVE SPENT £422! I COULD HAVE GONE TO BERLIN INSTEAD & USED IT TO PAY FOR THE £165 BA FLIGHT & £225 BERLIN PLAZA FOR FOUR NIGHTS, STILL WITH BEER & KNESEPFANNE MONEY LEFT OVER! I COULD HAVE SEEN THE HEATHROW PON DE REPLAY WOMAN. THEY’VE SHOCKED US AND HELPED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD. 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD. THE HMS BEAGLE LANDED ON THE GALAPAGOS 1835. I AM A GENTLEMAN SCIENTIST. A SYNOPSIS OF HIS LIFE’S WORK. PUBLISHING IT WAS LIKE CONFESSING TO A MURDER. I shrunk from all contact with the other children in nursery. I shrunk from all contact with other pupils at school. I shrink from all contact with people now as an adult. One of the great things about me is my blissful uncaredness: I couldn’t care what ——, or M—–, or G— think of me. I am in my private world, going there for my private reasons.