Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema but you cannot keep doing it all the time [25th Sept 2006]

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema, but you cannot keep doing it all the time. You cannot do it every week, 52 weeks a year. Yes I am missing out on all those experiences and all those heady nights and all those new people like Janet or Martini that might be arriving--but it is great to have some months when you do nothing, and then have some months when you go back to it. You have to deny yourself some things for a while, in order to enjoy them again. The longer I leave it the more I will appreciate it when I go back to my Pope life, my Francis Bacon life, my George Grosz life. The Broken World. The Shining Road. Once again I pore over the weather forecasts. For signs, auguries, of when the right time will be to resume my former sinful profligate life. I divine things from the weather. My sexuality is linked to the weather as much as it is linked to finance and to justice and to cathedrals. I will indulge my sexuality when the weather indicators are right, and the financial indicators are right, and the scales of justice feel right, and when in the cathedral it feels right. 

I love the wicked women. I have met some women I could trust in that broken world, Lela, for example, Ana Maria, Pamela. Diana in Berlin or Riccarda. Probably not Iga, as much as I love her! You can genuinely touch someone in that world and be touched by them, I think. I always go into that world looking for love, as I think they are the only women I could ever love. The clink of gold in the glass. The Tallulahs are probably no more cynical than the Esmeraldas. They are only nice to you as long as you are filling their glass with gold. Still, I think you can meet some exceptions, when something genuine passes between you, with Susi, with Janet, with --. And if I am wrong, then it does not matter. Fleetingly, it felt nice to real there was something real between us, if only in the blink of an eye. It is those moments that you keep go out looking for. That is what you keep gambling for, throwing so much money down on the roulette table for the very occasional moment when you get back more than you put in. That is what you keep trawling the broken world for, those fleeting moments when eye meets eye and some spark of electricity passes between you, and that current brings you back to life, for a couple of hours, or for one night, at least. That is what the poems of Hart Crane speak to me of: "The flesh assaults outright for bolts that linger". How you put on your beer goggles, so everything looks magical, everyone looks beautiful and desirable, and everyone seems to find you beautiful and desirable in return. If it is all commerce, simply, then no matter. There are just those brief moments when it seems so real, comes so close to being real, that it is as good as real. 

In every city there is Helen of Troy locked up somewhere in a room. She lives on like Orlando, like Emilia Makropolus. You go out every night searching for her, as David Tennant's Casanova always searches for Laura Fraser. "The sight of a whore is profoundly thrilling to a man". As a scopophiliac, sight is everything to me, and I lose myself in that world. For two months I have had to abstain completely and withdraw from it, only so that I might return refreshed and enjoy it anew. "There is only one woman in the world for me, you know that". "Who is she? Tell me!""No. She is cruel to me." "Maybe you were cruel to her." "Ah, that's what a bleeding heart does to a man. It drips and leaks into his soul, and before long floods his soul, and saturates him, and all his thoughts and all his words and all his deeds become bloody." "What could a woman do to help such a man?" "Well, if you would just give me your hand for a moment..." "No! You're an animal!" "If you would just step into this dark corner with me for a moment..." "No! Never again! No more dark corners with you!"

How I walked away from Irina without seizing my moment. How I walked away from -- without seizing my moment. How I walked away from Susi without seizing my moment. Maybe Riccarda, too. Pamela?

I live in the Ernest Dowson world. Don’t stick your head above the parapet unless you want to get shot at. When I hear Maneater I want to see -- dancing to it. I am obsessed with her.

"As Nietzsche put it, while recovering from his intoxication with Wagner: 'What can be done well today, what can be masterly, is only what is small.'"

And still the never ending rain continues (26th May 2006)

And still the never ending rain continues. All the greenery looks lovely in the wet, and it is muggy, despite the coldness of the rain. Massive breasts petite little South American blonde ponytail in sky blue sweater on bus, and asymmetric black hair goth with black sphinx eyes. Thoroughly depressed otherwise. Bleak and sombre. I feel like Hart Crane or Ernest Dowson, the morning after another disastrous foray into the broken world. A bad gamble. The £40 I spent on Demi and Pamela two weeks ago which I felt so happy about contrasts well against the horrible £40 I spent in the Old Axe on private dances with M—– and S——. A woman in the corner at Calcutta watching me as I came in, the same one who I looked up and found watching me before, the time I was sitting at the table & Ursula came up to collect glasses smiling. I did not see her go. The beer was warm!

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.”

****************

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.

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman (23rd April 2006)

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman. I am deliberately becoming a grand wreck. It is part of my project to experience new things, push an experience to the extremes. “Crane wrote to a friend, “You may not think it, yet there comes a great peaceful exaltation in merely reading, thinking, and writing.” Yet this was not enough to ward off sporadic spells of intense depression; he first attempted suicide at the age of 15 by slashing his wrists and taking an overdose of sleep medication.” Think of the kindness D— tries to offer you. C——, too. I am lonely. That is why I keep gravitating back to the Flying Scotsman like a moth to a flame, to the girls I know so well & the drink I know better. “Mariani brings alive the doubts and self-recriminations that constantly bedeviled Crane and the accusatorial inner voices that must have haunted him during his frequent hangovers. Alcohol and depression exacted a truly terrible physical and emotional toll on Crane, and his hair turned from premature gray to white by the age of 28. He was frequently jailed or beaten for his drinking, and Mariani’s index lists 17 instances of Crane’s “outrageous and violent behavior” due to alcohol. He embarrassed himself, alienated friends and damaged his ability to concentrate on his writing, but Mariani notes, “Like [Charlie] Chaplin, he meant to pick himself up, brush himself off, and go on whistling into the teeth of fate.”” 

“Like Hopkins, Crane sought an epiphanic vision, and Mariani notes, “In spite of the absence of any God he can name, there is a desperate vulnerability about Crane’s prayer for meaning” in poems such as “O Carib Isle!”….Crane once signed a postcard to his mother with the name “Atlantis.” As Mariani notes, “Even to himself he seemed a lost city.”….Mariani leaves us with the tragic image of a brilliant mind struggling with the desire to push the borders of poetry beyond the familiar and traditional to “new thresholds, new anatomies,” all the while contending with interior realities that were the source of both his greatest inspiration and his greatest unhappiness. Although Crane sank beyond the reach of lifesavers, thanks to Mariani’s book we retain a strong sense of the spiritual gates this poet sought to enter.” Very much on Saturday night I was thinking how fake all the smiles & friendship from the girls is, as they only smile & pretend to like you for the money. There are some exceptions to this, I think. D— is not nice to me just to get pounds from me, nor is C——. Maybe M——, too, and for a while —–. I could of look back at all the arguments I have been having at the Scotsman with a detached amusement. It is just an adventure I am having.

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now (23rd April 2006)

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now. I will never find a better job than this. All I want now is to lose myself in classical music. Just accept this will take a long while to get over. You are heading for ruin. Concentrate on the positives. Concentrate on writing with blue hands in cold stoveless rooms like Nietzsche, heading to the cold icy air of the mountains, where the air is thinner & there are less people. I always want to get to where there are less people. I seem to have lost interest in art museums, in classical music concerts. I am just lost in an emptiness. All there is is drinking. This coming week I will devote to writing, staying up all night, into the early hours of the morning. Funny how sweet & lovely to me the new brown top barmaid was; she was gorgeous to me. Jane was lovely to me. Even though my life is getting better year on year, there is always a period each year when I go into real psychological darkness & desperate straits. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

“Crane tends to be labelled as American poetry’s answer to both Rimbaud and Keats. Like the young Rimbaud he believed a poet’s vision derived from systematic deregulation of the senses; many of his poems were written in an alcohol-induced frenzy while listening to the same song on his Victrola over and over again, while his tireless, often dangerous cruising of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hoboken waterfronts – occasionally under the pseudonym Mike Drayton, in honour of the Elizabethan poet – shocked more conservative friends such as Allen Tate and Yvor Winters……..By the time he arrived in Mexico in 1931 he was grey-haired, puffy-featured, and subject to hallucinations, delirium tremens, and corrosive self-disgust. He wrote only one poem there, the sublime “The Broken Tower”, in which he acknowledged his inability to do more than merely “trace the visionary company of love”, or hold for longer than “an instant in the wind / each desperate choice”. A month after completing it in late March of 1932, Crane decided he had no choices left at all.”

I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind (3rd Oct 2006)

I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind. About life lived with no companionship whatsoever even though much may be offered. AUTISMUS. BLACK NARCISSUS. THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS. CASANOVA. NOT OF —–. I go through life with no companionship, even though —– offered me companionship and I threw the chance away. The chance to get to know another human being, and to be known by another human being, and I threw it away. “The harder we search for someone else, the more likely we are to find ourselves.” “But it is not Turgenev’s writing that interests Dessaix most, it is his life. Specifically, the 40 years Turgenev spent in supposedly chaste devotion to mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, trotting around Europe after her—and her husband—like a fuddy-duddy lapdog”. “He puts off visiting sites and is ultimately uninterested in peeking under the sheet to discover if Turgenev slept with his muse”. “The greatest of the 19th-century novels always centred on the journey towards that moment when one person is known by another, and is transfigured—or believes she is transfigured, or wants to be transfigured—by intimacy. From Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte to Tolstoy, novelists created and strengthened our faith in the absolute power of the love relationship to transform a life for good or ill”. “The American novelist Richard Yates died in 1992 with few of his books in print. His life was ‘a uniquely cheerless undertaking’…Yates ‘staggered from one badly paid teaching job to another, living in unbelievably squalid apartments and somehow writing further novels.” 

You wait so long for something special to happen in your life, that when it does, you just watch it in amazement & do not realise you have to make a move to catch it before it is gone and lost. A man on a desert island for 36 years finally sees a ship sailing by and is so shocked it is gone before he realises he should do something to make it stop. It is clear I have got to back and f–k either Demi or Pamela to cope with the pain of —–. I haven’t had sex since…Francesca on the 13th July, and both Francesca & Pamela the week before that. A lonely man, who never talks, just stands quietly on his own in the corner. When the girl he loves and pines for is just a few feet away on the other side of the pub, ready for him to talk to all night long if he wished, but still he stays on his own in the corner, talking to no one. 

I am Ernest Dowson, wandering around Europe after his rejection by Adelaide, suffering the torture of the damned. That is how I like to be. Pining for —–. Longing for —–. Bleeding for —–. I had a chance to get into her life and I let it go. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

I am a broken man. —– can see that now.

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City & Sexyland & Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Scotsman and Sunset Strip & Cinema but you cannot keep doing it all the time (25th Sept 2006)

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Scotsman and Sunset Strip & Cinema, but you cannot keep doing it all the time. You cannot do it every week, 52 weeks a year. Yes I am missing out on all those experiences and all those heady nights and all those new people like Janet or Martina that might be arriving—but it is great to have some months when you do nothing, and then have some months when you go back to it. You have to deny yourself some things for a while, in order to enjoy them again. The longer I leave it the more I will appreciate it when I go back to my Pope life, my Francis Bacon life, my George Grosz life. The Broken World. The Shining Road. Once again I pore over the weather forecasts. For signs, auguries, of when the right time will be to resume my former sinful profligate life. I divine things from the weather. My sexuality is linked to the weather as much as it is linked to finance and to justice and to cathedrals. I will indulge my sexuality when the weather indicators are right, and the financial indicators are right, and the scales of justice feel right, and when in the cathedral it feels right. 

I love the wicked women. I have met some women I could trust in that broken world, Lela, for example, Ana Maria, Pamela. Diana in Berlin or Riccarda. Probably not Iga, as much as I love her! You can genuinely touch someone in that world and be touched by them, I think. I always go into that world looking for love, as I think they are the only women I could ever love. The clink of gold in the glass. The Tallulahs are probably no more cynical than the Esmeraldas. They are only nice to you as long as you are filling their glass with gold. Still, I think you can meet some exceptions, when something genuine passes between you, with Susi, with Janet, with —–. And if I am wrong, then it does not matter. Fleetingly, it felt nice to feel there was something real between us, if only in the blink of an eye. It is those moments that you keep going out looking for. That is what you keep gambling for, throwing so much money down on the roulette table for the very occasional moment when you get back more than you put in. That is what you keep trawling the broken world for, those fleeting moments when eye meets eye and some spark of electricity passes between you, and that current brings you back to life, for a couple of hours, or for one night, at least. That is what the poems of Hart Crane speak to me of: “The flesh assaults outright for bolts that linger” The wine menagerie. How you put on your beer goggles, so everything looks magical, everyone looks beautiful and desirable, and everyone seems to find you beautiful and desirable in return. If it is all commerce, simply, then no matter. There are just those brief moments when it seems so real, comes so close to being real, that it is as good as real. In every city there is Helen of Troy locked up somewhere in a room. She lives on like Orlando, like Emilia Makropolos. You go out every night searching for her, as David Tennant’s Casanova always searches for Laura Fraser. “The sight of a whore is profoundly thrilling to a man”.

How I walked away from Irina without seizing my moment. How I walked away from —– without seizing my moment.How I walked away from Susi without seizing my moment. Maybe Riccarda, too. Pamela? 

 

Some beautiful new pictures of Sunset Strip on the website, what a surprise! Including two absolutely gorgeous pictures of —–. Oh you just look at those pictures and you see how attractive that world is, how easy it is to lose yourself in it, and submerge yourself in it, and let the waters close over your head, and disappear into another world. When you think of —– dancing to Promiscuous Girl. They are the best things in life. Maybe one day I will settle down with —–. Hahaha. I am abstaining from that world completely, just so I can dive back into it so completely when I am ready. Yes I owed £3,600 on October 1st last year, but I then still went ahead & went to Frankfurt for 4 days, Berlin for 5 days, Berlin for one night only, not to mention the last visit to Munich. What real nice warmth did I ever find in that world: —–, Janet, Sylvia, Martina, Amanda. Maybe Luana? I live in the Ernest Dowson world. Don’t stick your head above the parapet unless you want to get shot at.

When I hear Maneater I want to see —– dancing to it. I am obsessed with her. “As Nietzsche put it, while recovering from his intoxication with Wagner: ‘What can be done well today, what can be masterly, is only what is small.'”