Un peu de trop

This morning I malingered, which paid off unexpectedly when our furnace guy (looking more groomed but dressing worse) became unexpectedly chatty after tuning up the old beast and shared his recommendations for restaurants in his neighbourhood. Mythos and Spacca Napoli are now on our list of places to try, and in return perhaps he'll pay Masouleh a visit. In any case, I didn't feel too bad since I not only stayed a full day on Monday despite feeling progressively crappier through the afternoon, I put in an extra hour in order to help out at the annual GeoPuzzle Challenge. (Nothing quite like seeing excitable undergraduates struggle to piece all them big square states together while the clock ticks away.)

Taking the day off yesterday gave me a chance to finish Edmund White's The married man, which I have unexpectedly complex feelings about. On the one hand it's what a think of as a typical Gay Novel. (It could hardly be otherwise having been written by the man who pretty much invented the subgenre.) The protagonist is a privileged neurotic twat with obscenely wealthy friends who's prone to bilingual asides designed to show how au courant he is with la bonne vie. His lovers are petulant man-children too beautiful for this world and too spoiled to live without sponging.

And yet. There's great tenderness in the relationships between these men, all deranged to various degrees by rejection and fear. There's also tragedy in the arc of the protagonist's great love, who only discovers the satisfaction of hard work when he death becomes imminent. (The novel takes place during the height of AIDS epidemic, and all three main characters are seropositive.) But White also hints at an underlying calculation to his actions, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised to find he knew he'd found someone he could guilt into becoming his final caregiver. So there's some complexity underneath all the gilt and mother-of-pearl. White's a terrific stylist and I can't fault his plotting given that I read the whole thing in less than five days, which is unusual for me. Even so, one of these a year is probably more than enough, so I don't expect to be cracking Hotel de Dream in the near future.

For my next English-language read (I'm still mired in the Labro on one hand and the Stifter on the other), I was torn between Vikram Seth's An equal music and Julien Green's Midnight, so I'm reading both. monshu suggested I read something I've had for a long time, and the Green fits the bill. But I bought it before I was reading novels in French and I hate the thought of reading something in translation when I can avoid it. Still, not like I can't reread it in French if it seems worth it; so far, it doesn't. The GWO says his trick was to import Southern Gothic to the Continent, but so far the grotesquerie reminds me more of the Russians.

Seth, on the other hand, is refreshingly contemporary and easy progress. It is, however, forcing me to confront my deep-seated lifelong ignorance of music. I don't mean that I don't have some idea who the important composers are or what some of the challenges are of being a classically-trained musician, but it's a notional knowledge and a shallow one at that. All the years of going to the opera with Nuphy and I still can't hear a fraction of what he hears when he listens to a piece

This was brought home to me in a different way Sunday evening when we attended the piano recital of recent acquaintance. I liked his music, but I couldn't really tell you why and I certainly couldn't place him within the Western musical tradition. (I mentioned that it sounded neo-Romantic to me--perhaps because there were tunes--and Diego joked that he calls it "the Orange County school of Romanticism".) I've never had the discipline to train my ear, let alone delve into the formal theory of it all. But neither have White's gay sophisticates, so I guess I'm in good company after all, n'est pas?