A Bit of Flailing at the Keyboard

I am still waiting to hear back from the editor to whom I submitted, as requested, an essay of some 1600 words or so on a novelist I happen to love as much or more for his faults as for his virtues. (Not perhaps the happiest choice then on my part for a volume meant to represent the best of a particular literature dear to me, and to the editor, but... well, that's what I wrote anyway, so there it is.) I won't rehearse the essay here, as that might do me out of the fifty bucks it's meant to make me, but it's been more than twenty four hours since I sent the damned thing off, and I haven't had an acknowledgement yet! A ridiculous response, I know. Joking aside, I am grateful for the opportunity, and for the willingness of anyone, let alone an editor, to read my muzzy thoughts on even so happy, if obscure a subject as I chose. I'm just feeling anxious. It's been years since I was asked to contribute so much as a smile to anything like a real publication, by which I still snobbishly, perhaps quaintly, mean something appearing in print and for a price. And it isn't as if I ever made more than the cost of an indifferent lunch, or a free copy, from any such commercial undertaking in the past. Neither I nor my writing fell on hard times, I ought to say just here, I simply ceased to do much of it years ago. Acting was the reigning passion of my youth, and like acting, I found writing something for which, though I might have the knack, if not the skill, I no longer quite felt the need. In part, I've assumed for some time now, this was the result of a contented marriage. Poor A. has been forced to have both the best and worst of me over more now than twenty six years, and in return, he's been nothing but good. Seems greedy to want more than that, in a way, and I've been content knowing he'd have me, even when I wasn't specially entertaining. Satisfaction came for me in an audience of one, mostly. For acting, I've ended up in retail, which requires something like every working day, and not long ago I had the pleasure of organizing and doing a series of public readings which, while sadly unlikely now to be encouraged again or repeated hereafter, I thoroughly enjoyed in much the old way of my other, more traditional, amateur theatrics; I spoke loudly if not well, to polite applause from a small public and received the genuine encouragement of my true friends, deserved or not. Thrilling. Thrilling AND I never needed to actually "go off book," but could keep the page before me, a lazy ham's dream, that. As for writing, having got a bad sort of book out of me years ago, and having seen to it's proper burial, I assumed myself all but cured. I wasn't of course, but so it very much seemed at the time. What I actually did was write letters, not unlike my noodling here, that were then sent to friends and acquaintances alike down the years. Sometimes, when I was very lucky, the friends were good and wrote back. Sometimes, when the friend was extraordinarily good, as my friend R. has been, what I got back was, to my eye, as good or better than what I sent. Bliss.

In Austen and elsewhere, I've read of the aristocratic hobby of "private theatricals," performed for the amusement only of family, any friends not recruited into the performance, and such of the servants and local gentry as could be press-ganged into attendance. I doubt this sort of thing survived the coming of the talkies, even in the remoter counties, but then so little of what seems most thrilling about the gentlefolk of yore has: servants, huge breakfasts, comely stable-boys too polite to talk or easily bought off, good tailoring... And besides, I would have been, had I lived in Austen's day, shoveling shit in one form or another, not playing the Friar to m'lady's Juliet anyway. But the idea of acting, just a little, and not for a living, now that sounds rather wonderful.

Likewise the letter as a form of literature has great appeal. Admittedly, most of the letters I read are either by people, mostly professional writers, who wrote wonderfully elsewhere as well, or by people whose letters were about just such people, or politicians, or statesmen, or the scandalous rich, the exciting times in which they lived, that sort of thing. My efforts in this way, little or long, were unlikely to amuse any but the recipient and or such of our mutual friends who might be invited to read-along a little. Still, even if my letters never found their way under any one's gaze but the intended, I've enjoyed writing them over the years.

When I took up this blog and began completely neglecting such of my surviving, regular correspondents as still speak to me, I did so as a passive sort of protest, having written equally lightly elsewhere and having been unceremoniously made unwelcome there. I've kept at it here so long as I have as much as an experiment, or exercise of otherwise long-atrophied muscle -- just to see if I could, -- as from any need to say anything in particular to anyone in particular. What I've remembered, in the process, was something of the fun writing used to be, and, I must admit, just how much time it takes each day. (Though when I worry I'm leaving poor A. too much alone to come down here and type away, I go to check on him and often as not find him contentedly dozing in front of the television. He may well be relieved, after all these years, to not have me chattering at him quite so incessantly. I'm just guessing.)

Writing here has also, I should think, allowed my very kind friend B. to recommend me for the anthology to which I've just so impatiently submitted a short essay for consideration. Easier to explain myself as someone who writes, if only here, rather than just someone, in B.'s usual exaggeration when introducing me to third parties, "who's read everything." Kind of him to blow me up that way, if difficult to prove for being utterly false.

Also writing here has introduced me, however belatedly and reluctantly, to reading something on the computer beyond foreign newspapers, book reviews, movie listings, and porn. I've discovered some rather lovely people, blogging. One of them, for instance, has most recently started a an exchange on her blog about her own gestural excesses, or "flailing," as she seems to prefer. Quite funny, as have been any number of similar stories contributed by her regular readers.

Challenged to tell something of my own experiences of the inadvertent, I realized that the kind of knockabout described hasn't happened all that often to me. It's not that I am graceful, mind, just that my gestures tend to be somewhat more studied. A symptom of the same self-consciousness that made me struggle to lose the accent with which I grew up also made me careful about the use of my hands. If my accent showed me up as a rube, my hands might betray me as queen. Mustn't be too broadly expansive, too loose at either wrist or shoulder, as that, like the problem of the sibilant "s," was an obvious "tell."

I'm reminded of the scene in "Victor/Victoria" when Robert Preston is explaining to Julie Andrews how to perform correctly as "a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman." Preston's dear, queer Toddy, insists on "Tons of shoulder! Remember, you're a drag queen!" Hilarious, but also among the terrors of my youth, all that shoulder.

I think it fair to say that acting, and writing, were and perhaps still are for me, primarily a means to both allow for and amend my inclination to flail, which, in my case is just another way to name my innate and obvious queerness.

What makes this funny though is that these efforts to tamp down also, to my way of thinking, made me if anything more obviously fey. Subtlety is hardly a masculine physical virtue, is it? Stillness is, but then I've never managed that.

So, I'd have to say my personal experience of flailing has less to do with knocking wineglasses onto white satin dresses, than with being caught, as I was recently while waiting to be seated in a good restaurant, staring at some hot male ass and, rather than tripping or bumbling into a passing waiter, assuming a rigid dignity as I turned and walked directly into a closed door.

As with nattering above at my first real editor in years, I seem to only do actual harm to myself. Embarrassing enough, that.