Why I write

I write because the models offered to me in youth as instruments to understand the world appeared too geometrical. From my father, I learned that you had to win, but found winning an uphill struggle with a weed of a body in a town infested with the offspring of thugs. From the Oblate fathers, and the Christian brothers of Ireland and the Sisters of St Anne, I was informed that my state of spiritual perfection left much to desire, only to discover that they had a ponzi scheme of their own simmering. But, most importantly, as I left off with the visions of my original mentors, I began to surmise that the world, as it stood, was a marvellous, many-coloured universe filled with everything you could possibly desire and much more, if only you had the guts to say to yourself - I want that.

So, I threw away the prizes which my mentors taught me were the worthwhile ones - respect, reputation, career, everything! And I threw myself at the mercy of the world, and took my advice from the poets and the vagabonds and the losers festering at the bottom of life's rockpile. They all taught me the same thing - that you had to take the world as it is, that you had to figure it out, and you had to love it with all its imperfections. Everybody gets burned.

I write for the same reason as my masters - Cendrars, Philippe Djian, Rabelais and Henry Miller and Villon and Catallus and de Gourmont - to propose an alternative way of understanding the world.

The writing I offer satisfies nothing of the tenets of the creative writing schools, of the journalists, of the professionals - they despise what I write, and they sneer at the manner of its expression and the omissions of what their dogmas say are the only acceptable ways to express thought. Clearly, they are absolutely right in their assessment. I can never live up to their requirements. I am a pariah. I betray everything they stand for.

My writing is the writing of a pyromaniac. If you like standing close to the heat, you'll see the sparks flying in every direction.

Anything that doesn't suit me gets tossed out of my attic overlooking the North Sea onto the paths close by, and the Batavian winds carry the looseleaf sheets away and drop them into the canals of this polderized land.

I am writing to you, and I address my words to a memory of you and to something which you no longer are - as icons and figurines from my ancient past - I want you all to know that writing of the type I propose is the surest way to poverty and loneliness, but it takes you to the realms of your deepest dreams. I write with great affection as you all form part of the mosaic, and some of you are renegades of the earliest hours, when to be a renegade was an act of courage.

As for those of you who are confused by this missive, or by acts which are those of a crazed man - moving to China after Tianenmen, consorting with rogues and psychopaths and con-men, dropping a sparkling career at the drop of a hat and without a second thought, lay the blame for it at the doorstep of literature.

Michael Jackson vs Neda

The story of Tehran eloquently demonstrates that people don't want religion, they want the right to live free and in peace. We forget the Iranians at our own peril.

On the left, the man principally responsible for Neda's death. A Charlie Manson figure - hyperactive, grinning monkey face of a serial killer. On the right, a beautiful young woman with dreams.

But, the world's attention is already fading, this morning our media mourns the loss of an entertainment figure named Michael Jackson, a warped Christ figure, the symbol of an unnamed religion which rules the minds of the West.

Who is this man?

Who is this man?

When the eminent visiting Baghdad professor gave her guest lecture, she referred to the American liberation of Iraq. Actually, you must mean the American occupation, don't you? No, I meant liberation. "If you knew what life was like under Saddam, you wouldn't call the arrival of the Americans an occupation. Things are infinitely better now."

That muted the enthusiasm of the questioner, an enlightened "global historian". Which brings us to Uday, In October 1988, at a party in honor of Suzanne Mubarek, wife of the Egyptian president, Uday murdered his father's personal valet and food taster, Kamel Hana Gegeo. Rumour has it that the dirty deed was done at the request of his mother. Before an assemblage of horrified guests, an intoxicated Uday bludgeoned Gegeo with a cane, reputedly administering the coup de grâce with an electric carving knife. Gegeo had recently introduced Saddam to Samira Shahbandar, a younger woman who later became Saddam's second wife. Uday considered his father's relationship with Shahbandar an insult to his own mother.

There's a lot of fighting going on inside Baghdad's parliament, but things have improved, and nobody can remember Uday, outside of his immediate victims.

Theological Guide to Survival

Part One - dead fish eyes

The key to scoping out these bastards, whether they're Jesuit priests or Iranian mullahs or Wahhabi sadists or Christian brothers or the pope is to look into their eyes, and never forget they're humans - they're not humans like you and me, mind you. They're humans who have never held down day jobs, and they're humans who claim they have private conversations with god. Blasphemy, a word they loosely bandy about when it suits their interests - is defined is the act of slandering god. What better example than claiming you're the only one who talks to him.

It's also crucial to forget what they claim to be through their funny hats, and their pulpits and their jihads and the cassocks and the pimpy rings they like to sport. Look at what they do. This last week, the henchmen of the Guardian Council of Iran shot dead a beautiful 26 year old girl for the crime of getting out of her car. Then, they banned the family from having a funeral ceremony for her. Indeed, the death was blamed on the victim. Last week six members of the national football team wore green armbands to denounce a fraudulent election, and for this crime were banned for life from playing football. We'll see whether the Iranians love Allah or football more in the coming weeks. It's what they do that counts.

While trying to stick their hands down our pants, the Christian brothers liked to tell us that we were the worst individuals who had ever crossed their path. Without realizing it, they did us a big favour. We all learned that authority was not to be trusted, and that it was doubly treacherous when it claimed to be preaching a divined message.

But, remember, the key is to look in their eyes - if you have to, hang on to some garlic and spit on the ground, but look into their eyes. The one thing these religious miscreants of every stripe have in common is that they have purged love right out of their souls. Analogy - if you take a psychopathic serial killer - say Karla Holmolka - and don't look at her curly hair or little girly smile, you can see the dead fish eyes. Same thing with the religious freaks - remove the crucifix or the prayer beads or the mullah turban or the koran - and you're staring straight into the eyes of a human who will murder you for disagreeing with him.

So in a sense they're like us - they're human beings and no better - but in another sense, they have nothing in common with us. Because anyone who kills a beautiful woman for an idea, or molests a young boy for comfort has extirpated love right out of his soul. And, if there's no love, there can be no freedom.

There are times - rare now - when my mind turns back to the men in skirts who purported to teach me about life the real hard way, and console myself with the thought of their age, and their decrepit bodies being lowered into the ground in the not so distant future, and even the worms wondering whether it's worth the risk.

Mullahs vs Christian Brothers

I was taught by the Christian brothers of Ireland, and they were allowed to smack us harder than what these mullahs do to their disciples, but the language is similar. We knew our enemy, and Brothers Short, French, Cooper, MacKenzie, McGivern, Slaherty and various other pedophiles, psychopaths and similar deviants charged with our upbringing never hesitated to unleash their fury, but they were careful about pulling their dicks out with me and my friends, because we fought back. During their reign of terror, we were told constantly that we were worthless, that our school spirit was no good, that they couldn't wait to get rid of us. But, that was pro forma - you might see the odd skirted man walking through the changing room by the gym for no reason at all - that was Brother MacKenzie's trick - but even he knew better than to stop for a look see.

Father McCann, the parish priest, ended up doing time, partly for screwing Meyer's sister, but most of these devout Christian brothers got away with their crimes. I'm pretty sure that to this day, they figured it was their right to chase young boys around. To hear their end of it, the lawyers were responsible for it all - trying to seize school lands they were, just because a few lonely souls were seeking comfort from the boys. No compassion!

These petrified blasphemers running the Guardian Council also look pretty mean and powerful these days, but my guess is their life expectancy is being reduced. Sixty per cent of Iranians are under the age of thirty, and they've tasted the good life. The women are beautiful, the protesters have intelligence and moxy and anger on their side. They're not going to forget this shite soon. Hopefully, they can corner some of these thugs - if they manage to lynch Saeed Mortazavi, the bloodthirsty prosecutor, that might shake them up a bit.

Hope they pull it off.

Writing is painting

You should only write for strangers. You, whoever you are, obscure reader from the heterogenous junkpile of cyberspace, are closer, more intimate to me than anyone of my diminishing entourage. Because I write about whores and transvestites, seedy lawyers and acidheads and...teachers and priests and whoever else crosses my path, mental or physical, questions of reality arise.

Writing is a treacherous, razor-sharp path to follow, but from a technical standpoint, it is no more and no less true than painting. When a painter uses his skills to portray a woman as fleshy, corpulent, thick lipped, sensual, flashing a piece of toosh while smoking a cigar, the viewer and a fortiori the critic sees the genius. If the writer performs the same task, he risks his neck, or the omerta of silence. That being said, the only thing to do is to write and write, in silence, in solitude, and let it forge a stronger temperament.

Cézanne is a reference as painter, and as a solo man, who understands the nature of the challenge before the artist.

Three citations of Cézanne guide my entire technical approach to writing:

"La lumière et l'ombre sont un rapport de couleurs, les deux accidents principaux différant non par leur intensité générale mais par leur sonorité propre. L'ombre est une couleur comme la lumière, mais elle est moins brillante ; lumière et ombre ne sont qu'un rapport de deux tons".

"Peindre d'après nature, ce n'est pas copier l'objectif, c'est réaliser ses sensations".

"Il faut traiter la nature par le cylindre, la sphère et le cône".

These three credos are the cornerstones of my own writing. Writing is the reaction of the personality to outside phenomena, and the placing of it in a cylinder, sphere or cone. Writing is geometrical, as the ideas are contained in invisible abstract containers conceived originally by Euclid, and it is laid down on paper in geometrical fonts, each of which contain a history and talismanic properties proper to each letter, word, phrase, and omission.

The New Europe

The New Borgias

There's always been three Europes - The Europe of the con-men, the Borgias, the conquistadores, the sun Kings, the head-loppers, the Gilles de Rais and the Europe of genius and sanctity - Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Fra Filippo Lippi - and in wing three, a small cell of anarchic free-thinking Europe - Rabelais, Rimbaud, Mata Hari, Céline - lone free thinkers with their own take on things and not conned in the least.

One of the great current scams of the current Europe - con-man wing - is temporarily convincing the world that it is a viable enterprise, when it's nothing more than a multi-tribal Ponzi scheme that makes Madoff et al look like backyard marble players. Between the collapse of German industry and employment, the impending bankruptcy of Central European homeowners and businesses; and the threat of government debt defaults from loss of monetary control by the Irish Republic, Greece and Portugal, the relocation of every con artist and their dog to Strasbourg and Brussels, and the jabberwocky 800 page piece of tripe called a constitution which contains secret bailout schemes, the destruction of the nation state and 798 pages of smoke and mirrors, now it is the perfect time to bet short against the euro.

While the Americans clean up the shop, the Europeans are going the old road - conceal, cover up, subvert, and where necessary slur, poison, neutralize. Sticking with the devils they know.

Estrangement II

While driving down the I-5 south on the way to San Francisco from Mount Shasta, I was thinking of the last time I'd talked to Rudy - from old Hugo's bed, him strangled less than 36 hours earlier, and me already putting a healthy dent in his residual stock of Campari...it was payback time after that unpleasant night watching him hoard all the Chivas back in the West End.

Somebody strangled him in his Mexico City hotel room - and the speculation was rampant - he was gay, he was a Russian spy, he was part of an Opus Dei style underground conspiracy. But, really the only relevant question was why hadn't it been done sooner? The Mexicans are a proud people, and I could easily see anybody - maybe a waiter cutting him up with a gutting knife after he complained just once too many times about his tortillas being soggy or his plate not being rewarmed. And Julio returning a little later to finish him off on principle alone. Whether he was gay or a spy was irrelevant - He had the family gift of being able to instantly piss people off.

Hugo's apartment was in the Ontario university town where he chaired the history department, name withheld to protect innocent working people who actually show up for work.

Inside Hugo's living room, there was a dark teak Telefunken stereo console in the French provincial style with a high gloss finish, with an AM-FM-SW radio and turntable, and plenty of cupboard space, stacked full of at least twenty bottles of single malt, Campari and Gin and two full cartons of Marlboro light, which just happened to be my brand. I parked my ass in his bed with a bottle of the Campari, lit up a smoke, and turned on the TV. "The elephant man" was on. It was a story about a sideshow freak, who had all kinds of redeeming features. Sounded like a tribute to Hugo. After the elephant man's dignity was restored, I reached for the telephone. The nice thing about getting murdered is nobody cuts off the phone service. And, I had friends from Chile to the Soviet Union, and time to kill until the men in frocks showed up to conduct the funeral. So, I decided to call Rudy.

Since our Leuven drinking days, Rudy had become an icon of the San Francisco cultural world. He lived on Alabama Avenue, just south from Market Street, and did a lot of work at the Queer Cultural Centre. He was doing a lot of work on Aids and the construction of queer identity, at least that's what his website said. Then, it said he'd developed an allergy to paint. It wasn't just Rudy, it seemed like everybody had a similar story. You become an artist, then what happens? You end up with a paint allergy.

But, he hadn't been seen around for a while. Apparently, he'd started to hang in a real scuzzy area of town, but if I wanted the address, he could dig it up for me.

Oh, yea, I can wait...