Day 19 - Favorite book turned into a movie

What an ambiguous question! The way it is worded it could easily mean it wants to know your favorite book that just also happened to be turned into a movie, but doesn't care about what you thought of said movie.

I am pretty sure that's not what it means. But a clearer way to phrase it would have been "favorite movie adapted from a book", guys. Clarity!

Although I will grant you that movie adaptations are complicated territory, and it might be more about a book that was dear to you and turned into a movie, and just your general thoughts on that. But in that case the word "favorite" becomes weird. In general this is a weird question.

Anyway.

The actual answer to this question is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which I think is the most successful adapation around, but I already cheated once with comics, so I'm gonna do a legit book this time. And in fact I'm gonna go with a book AND movie that I have already mentioned.

Maurice, by E. M. Forster, adapted by Ismail Merchant & James Ivory

Merchant-Ivory, as they are called, are pretty brilliant in general with their Forster adaptations, of which they did three. This one is easily the best one, and not because I suspect it is also the best book of the three (though I admit I have not read any other Forster yet). It loses some things, of course, but enhances others, and I think it was played with a great subtle honesty that captures the real essence of the book. This is an empowering movie for gay men, which is a rare bird indeed, and it is sexy as hell, and it was made in goddamn 1987 featuring a very young and smooth-faced Hugh Grant, and an unbelievably gorgeous tinykins Rupert Graves (pictured, left). Also James Wilby (pictured, right), but most people don't know who he is on account of his not appearing in A) every romantic comedy ever B) an outrageously popular BBC miniseries.

True story: I once read a review of this movie on Amazon dot com from a woman who said that before she saw this movie, she had a low opinion of homosexuals and had no idea that their love could be meaningful/real. She claimed with fairly heartfelt words that this movie legitimately changed her perspective. If that's not success I don't know what is.

Day 07 - Most underrated book

This is a tricky one! What does "underrated" mean? Underrated by whom? Because I don't really pay a huge amount of attention to what The People are saying, and I don't read book reviews... I only ever knew what my fellow students thought about books we read in class. And in class you hate almost everything you have to read.

So here's what I did. I googled "underrated books" and looked at the lists of books lacking in ratings on goodreads.com, which isn't really the same thing I guess, but whatever?? And I spotted one that was actually in my Day 2 post.

Maurice, by E. M. Forster

Yo, not only is this book great, it's an important cultural document. A novel about a young man coming to terms with his sexuality in a difficult time period, written from real life experience. Forster doubted it would ever be published due to its themes. But it was, eventually, and not enough people know about it.

I guess I don't have much more to say about it, except I need to read it again. Here's a promotional photo from the totally sexy Merchant-Ivory film adaptation:

yissssssss

Stories by R. Jackson (1)

First, a little note to say sorry for my brief absence. My computer died its long-anticipated death rather abruptly while I am over here in the midwest visiting my girlfriend, The Liminal Pagan. And I had to scramble to get a new baby. In order to break it in, I transcribed a little story that I wrote by hand in the library the other day. And now I am sharing it with you.

Warnings/Notes: This story contains a lighthearted but vulgar anecdote, which is made from the same sort of language and content you might expect from a group of dudes hanging out in a bar talking about sex. So, let that be known.

There will probably be more words from this narrator sometime in the future, on account of I like him a great deal and I think he has more to say. We'll see.

“There’s this girl up in Webster what fetishizes the writin’ hand,” I told the boy.

The bartender slid me a shot. “You tellin’ stories, Jackson?”

“No, sir. Honest to Charlie. I met her last month and she was a real piece, if you get my double meaning. It was the writin’, see,” I told the boy.

“You a writer?” he asked me.

“Sure enough,” I told him. “See I met her at this little get-together-like, up in Webster. Where all us unpublished nothings do a bit of readin’, a bit of minglin’, tryin’ to drum up attention and givin’ each other critiques and so forth. She was one of the folks just come to listen. She come up to me after, says she was a real fan of my work. Says it really touched her. She was sincere, too. We had a real good chat about it for a few minutes, about the particulars and whatnot. I had no idea she was about to take it where she took it. Took me completely by surprise.”

“Where’d she take it?”

“She told me she wanted me to come up to her room so as she could watch me masturbate.”

“She did not.”

“She did. Honest to Charlie,” I said. “And I gotta say it surprised me so much I couldn’t do nothin’ but take her up on it. So up we went.”

The bartender was listening again. “Fine way to lose your cock, Jackson.”

“How do you figure?”

He shrugged. “Sounds like a proposition some psycho would make. Good way to end up a mutilated corpse. Or else wake up in a bathtub full of ice with your phone taped to your wrist, and missin’ a kidney.”

“Better a kidney than a cock,” I said. “Say, you got a real morbid mind, Earl. A real imaginative mind. You ever thought about bein’ a writer?”

The bartender shrugged. “I call ‘em like I sees ‘em,” he said.

“Right,” I said, and turned my attention back to the boy. “So anyway, as I was sayin’, we go up to her room, and she offers me a chair and tells me to get to it. No more friendly chatter, no drink, no kiss, nothin’. Just right to the dirty solitaire.”

“Jesus, Jackson,” muttered Earl.

“So what’d you do?” the boy asked.

“What anyone would have done,” I said. “I whipped it out and spit into my hand and started jerkin’ it.”

“That is assuredly not what ‘anyone’ would have done,” said Earl.

I had the boy good and wrapped up now. “What’d she do?”

“Just sat there an’ watched,” I said. “I’d never been in a position like that before, and it turns out I’m sorta sheepish, so I just focused on the task at hand, as it were, thinkin’ ‘bout all the regular things.”

“Like what?” the boy asked.

“All the regular things,” I said.

“I thought this story was about writin’,” said the bartender.

“I’m gettin’ to it,” I said. “So this girl, she waits until I’m good and hard, waits until damn near the last moment, then she interrupts me. I was sorta gettin’ into it by then, so she sorta took me by surprise, just sneakin’ up into my lap an’ grabbin’ my hand. She looks up at me and she says, ‘This your hand what does the writin’?’ And I say ‘Yes ma’am.’ And she says ‘I want you to fuck me with it.’”

Earl let out a short bark of a laugh, but I could tell he was into it by then.

“Seriously?” said the boy.

“Very truly,” I said. “Then she proceeds to do all the fucking herself. I could barely lift a pen the next day, to tell it true. Honest to Charlie, she fucked the daylights out of my hand.”

“What about the rest of you?” asked Earl.

“The rest of me she left mostly alone. See the thing is, she gets off on the hand that does the writin’. Like it’s the hand itself that’s the storyteller or somethin’. It’s the one what holds the pen, so it’s like the mighty instrument of my authorial genius, see? The whole bit with the masturbation, that’s just so she knows for sure which hand it is.”

“But why—” said the boy, then stopped himself, like he was embarrassed.

“Why didn’t she just ask?” said Earl.

“Earl, I take back what I said. You got no imagination at all,” I said.

Earl just shrugged. He don’t take nothin’ personal.

“Because the intrigue,” I said. “This is a girl who likes good stories, remember. It wouldn’t do to just ask a thing like that. She has to be clever. Subtle.”

“What the hell is subtle about inviting you to come masturbate at her place?” demanded Earl.

“She could have asked you to sign something,” suggested the boy.

“Subtle but direct,” I amended. “And it was also about being fair. Fucking my hand was mostly about her, see? So she waited until I was good to go and then it was more evenly balanced. So we both got somethin’ out of it.”

That left them both quiet for a few.

“Well damn,” said Earl.

“And that,” I said, and finally took my medicine, “is the story of the girl up in Webster, what fetishizes the writin’ hand.”

“You ever go back there again?” asked the boy.

I said, “Nah. She was only interested in the one time. Besides, she’s not really my type.”

“Uh-huh,” said Earl.

“Honest to Charlie,” I said. “Because it ain’t the hand that does the writing, see. It ain’t any one part of me. It’s the whole me. It’s fuckin’ intangible.” I lit myself a cigarette and took a nice long drag. “She was a real wild, interesting character. But at the end of the day, she was all wrong about what makes a story.”

“Isn’t that what they say about you?” muttered Earl, his interest sufficiently waned.

I turned to the boy and stuck out my hand. “I’m Jackson, by the way.”

“I know,” said the boy, making a little glance at Earl as he shook my hand.

I grinned. “I hope my story didn’t offend you,” I said. “I been known to speak the naked truth to strangers, even perfect strangers, such as yourself.” I wondered if he’d get my little joke. He quirked an odd half-smile, like he almost did.

“You wanna come over for a bit?” I asked.

“I’m left-handed,” he said.

“I know.” I pointed to his half-finished beer, perched between his open left fingers. “Come anyway.”

Maybe he wasn’t sure why, but he took me up on it.

A little while later, when he was situated comfortably between me and my bedroom wall, he asked, “Who’s Charlie?”

“Hm?”

“You keep saying ‘honest to Charlie,’” he said. He was a little out of breath. “I never heard that expression before. Who’s Charlie?”

I smiled at him. “You are. You’re Charlie.”

“My name’s Patrick.”

“Doesn’t matter. Charlie’s just a placeholder, see. It could be anything. I don’t believe in God, so I use Charlie, and Charlie is whatever I would swear by. Whatever I happen to be worshipping.”

He grinned. A nice grin. “So I’m Charlie?”

“Right now you are.” I leaned into his long, tender neck. “In the bar it was the whiskey.”

Later still, when he was splayed gently across my bed with an arm draped over me, he said, “Was it really a girl, in the story?”

I blew another in the long catalogue of imperfect smoke rings. “You’re asking if I’m exclusively a fag,” I said.

“Well…”

“I like all sorts.” The cig was boring me. I put it out in the ashtray by my bed. “And I always mean what I say.”

“Always?”

“Well, I’m not perfect,” I said. “But I sure do try.”

That was the story of how I met Patrick.

I Am He You Are He You Are Me

This was written for a friend, who prompted me with the words "boys in lipstick, a threesome, superstitions, albino crows, bootblacking" and with the most excellent pick-up line ever courtesy of e e cummings:

listen: there's a hell

of a good universe next door; let's go

I don't know how well I answered the prompt, but I ended up with something more than a little strange. I feel like it's teetering on the precipice of being something bigger and less disjointed, but I think it's best to let it sit. I didn't have a great deal of control over this narrator.

So here it is, as is: a chaotic fragment.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen.”

You weren’t listening.

“The fuck is an albino crow?” you persisted.

What a pair: the pea and the pomegranate seed. You’re so natural, so green behind the ears (if that is the saying I want), a little hint of overturned earth. You came right off the farm and you’d break a man’s nose for anything less than a full-hearted embrace of your lack of college education and your heathen temper. I like you. I’ve always liked you. You never learned but you’re always learning. I knew we were meant to be before you even threw your first punch.

The pomegranate, now; he’s something else. You’re old and young and he’s young and old, if you know what I mean. You’re a fixture, a reliable structure, been here since the dawn of time, where time is my willingness to talk about any of this. Who’s this guy? He comes in here with his tall leather boots and his pierced ears and piercing gaze, mouth full of bright red lipstick just itching to leave a bloody imprint on a napkin, or your cheek. He’s wild like the center of a storm, every muscle relaxed, coiled. He’s a predator. I had to have him. I’m not one for petty superstitions but this is twice in one lifetime, love at first sight, and doesn’t that have to mean something? I love you, aggressive, thoughtful, ignorant you, and I want him, I need him, I have to be his. He won me the moment he stepped into that place. Where were we again? Oh yeah.

“Listen,” he said.

“You listen,” you retort. “You said you worked for Albino Crow. And I’m asking, what the fuck’s an albino crow? I mean ain’t that just a dove? Cause it sounds like it’d just be a dove.”

And he smiled at you, a calm, tiger smile. “A crow is a crow, and not a dove at all,” he said. “That’d be like saying every white man is the same white man.”

“No it ain’t, it ain’t that at all.”

“In any case, the Albino Crow I’m talking about is just a record label.” He leaned forward over the table. “You like music?”

“I like music, everyone likes music,” you said, and you looked at me, maybe for help, though you’d be damned to hell and uncertain torment before you’d admit it. “You know who the fuck this is?”

I know I want to be a part of his narrative, if that’s what you mean (it isn’t).

“Listen,” he said again. “There’s a hell—”

“What kind of music?” you wanted to know.

“—of a good universe next door,” he continued. He smiled. I wanted those lips. I wanted those teeth. “Let’s go.”

The two of you are made for each other. You might not realize it yet (he, of course, realized it right away), but this is the start of a beautiful et cetera. There’s a part of you that knows, or senses, or at any rate won’t turn down an opportunity, and it’s the part of you that moves, gets up, and the rest of your body follows. You throw me a look that says “You’d better be coming.” You don’t want to be left alone with the Devil, the madman, the albino crow. You’ll want it soon enough. I just pray you’ll take me with you.

The hell of a good universe is exactly the paradox it sounds like. Everything is bright. Everything is faded. It doesn’t matter. It does.

It was an enclosure of open space. Speciously spacious. Spuriously so. If I’ve got to describe it, then that’s how. Bookshelves of buildings. Staircases leading nowhere, or maybe everywhere. Towers of stairs. Down we went, down and down, of course down. Mephisto and his pair of Fausts. Maybe one of us is Gretchen. I’ll be Gretchen. I don’t mind. Down to the valley. Into the street.

Losing grip on reality is something we’ve become very good at, you and I. It comes from the unholy marriage of your casual disregard for it all and the slow tick tick tick of the bomb of my brain. I don’t have time for it, I mean. It’s such a waste of energy, believing in the world, when there are beautiful boys in lipstick and tall, leather boots. We said so many things during that walk without speaking a single word. I felt you simmering, settling, felt him drawing you in. You know what I see in him now. I think you’re ready. What’s more, I think he waits until you’re ready.

And then, oh: a door.

“Here,” he said. And I saw the crow, I’m sure it was a crow even though it looked quite like a dove, white-feathered and red-eyed. There was this mad moment where I was certain it was him, the crow I mean. In the land of living metaphor the contradiction is king.

Look at us: what an odd contraption. He’s already done the impossible, made it through the patchwork of your defenses and the tangle of your clothes, and my attention’s elsewhere. There is something perversely beautiful, you know, about watching the two of you. It’s more than I can bear. I have to look away. I focus on the boots. I’ll be Gretchen, I’ll be the shoeshine boy. I don’t care. I don’t care.

Don’t forget me.

November

I wrote this over a year ago, and just revised it today. I was really, really thrilled with it a year ago, and now my love for it has waned a little. I think the metaphors are a little bewildering and a little muddled. But there are things I still like about it, so here it is.

This is an erotic story about two men. Nothing explicit, but not exactly tame either.

Here we are, and who are you?

I saw you from across the room, like they do in movies, only the room didn’t stop, I had to excuse myself from the one-sided conversation with the heiress who’d held me captive with her senseless rambling drivel, I fear I was quite rude you know, only now does that occur to me, and what a time to realize. Too late now, too late then as I made my silent way across the room, leaving my half-finished drink on the tray of a passing waiter for fear that I would need both my hands free, and I wonder at the back of my mind just when it is you first noticed me. I’d never seen you before, I could never forget a face like yours, nor the curve of your back, nor the sharp cut of your jaw touched with yesterday’s five o’clock shadow, and perhaps you’re a guest or perhaps you’re one of the many uninvited who drop in with the almighty influence of affluence, but I don’t care about that, not right now. Champagne always hits me fast and I’ve had three and a half glasses full and nothing to eat since two o’clock this afternoon, and has anyone told you that the darkness of your hair and your eyes gives you this unnatural severity, I felt like I was being looked dead in the face by the entire month of October, only that isn’t right, I don’t know what I’m saying. You’re a November if you’re anything.

And here we are in this elevator, this elevator tainted with sordid three-minute affairs, people just like you and me except I am sure that you are not like them at all; that might be a shallow observation but as my hands grip the rail that digs inconveniently into me and my neck stretches up until my head hits the perversely mirrored wall I find myself unable to care, unable to think. Your lips are perfect, has anyone ever told you?

I don’t know what it was about you, perhaps I shall never know, perhaps this is one of those instances of which we shall never speak, perhaps, even, we shall not see each other again. I know that as I approached you the room seemed to vanish even though it didn’t, and I know you felt it too as you gave me your little smile, the upturned edges of those lips I wanted all over my body, I barely said two words to you, something vague and floundering like “I wonder if I might—” and how is it that you knew so perfectly exactly what I meant, that you should take me subtly by the wrist and lead me away from that mundane reality, that you should be such a grand escape artist in your own perfect right.

We made it as far as this elevator and I whispered “I can’t remember what floor I’m on and I don’t know that I can wait,” and you told me not to worry, chose a number that was a long ways off, dropped to your knees and deftly took me with you. Here we are, my fingers in your hair gently pressing you closer. You accept my impatience with absolute calm, and perhaps you are even smiling as you shatter my tightly knit resolve; this I cannot know.

Why have I broken every rule to do this now, here, with you, you whom I have never seen but who destroyed me utterly in that instant from across the room?

Who are you?

The bell shoots me straight through the heart as the doors open, and like nothing’s happened you’re up and resetting my clothes like you do it every day, and you take me around the waist and guide me out into the elegant spread of a hallway, to hell with whoever might be there, might be watching us, I can see only your shoes and this hideous carpet, the quick punches of your feet against these flattened colors which mock your whole autumnal nature, muddied and dulled with time and the feet of a thousand people just like us.

Not like us.

Men like me are a dime a dozen and I am sure there are a million of them. I am no one, but there is no one like you, no one on this earth, I become convinced of this as I struggle to lift my head and study the sliver of your face which is so fixed on the door to which you have us careening, and I wonder just how drunk I am.

The door is opened and closed again with us on the other side, and you hold me there against it and this time you are not quick, you are not efficient, your mouth wanders lazily up the path of my throat seeking out something intangible like a moan or a sigh, and I will give you all of it, only do not stop. Your hands tighten around my arms and it’s as though you know me, know my every unspoken desire, the fluttering secrets that beat within the folds of my heart. Your hands slip down to my wrists, dragging my arms down behind me, pulling me back into a small arc, gaining purchase at the base of my throat. I am gasping, defenseless. November I am yours.

How is it that I am here on this bed, with this sunlight playing against your features? How is it that I can remember every inexpressible detail of the night without being able to linger on a single one, like a dream that is impossible to explain even as you grasp and try to hold it still. I am hung-over and for several seconds it is the happiest hangover of my life.

“And you would be?” I say, drifting, lost at sea in these twisted bed sheets.

You smile and your fingers brush along my face. Are your hair and your eyes as dark as I remember them, or am I dreaming still?

“You’re not what I expected,” you say, and the wide-awake depth of your voice does not disappoint me, how could it, when it is so different here in the morning light and yet it is unavoidably the same voice that told me so gently to be quiet, to keep still, to give in, to love you for exactly one hour and thirty-three minutes.

I turn and stretch, working my body in and out of half-remembered positions. “Am I not?” I say. “I suppose I’m happy to hear that.”

You tilt your head and look at me with a curious smile, a smile that I want to see for the rest of my life.

Oh, November, what fool gave you a day less for us to share? Thirty is not enough, my dear beautiful. Stay with me always, you who has such power within seconds, who commands my every bodily sensation from across a room crowded with the empty-headed and the illustrious. Oh stay with me, stay.

Your fingers curl around me and spread across my back, to show me that you’ve heard.

“Do you want to go?” you ask, I can’t imagine why.

“No, no, no,” I say quietly. “No, no, no, no, no.”

You smile again. “What do you want?”

I draw myself closer to you, because to answer is to become tiresome.

You press your lips into the hollow of my temple, and you ask it again. “What do you want?”

To know everything about you. To know nothing. I do not answer because I don’t know how. I fear that I have fallen in love with you, and the fading perceptions of last night, the fading champagne, the everything and the all of it fading into the dreadfully real sensations of the bed sheets and the light and the ache in my head and my stomach, it leaves me flustered and embarrassed at the idea of it, at having become so lost in a contestable emotion at the very first sight of you. I am a storybook character, a stereotype risen from a weakly versed poem, and here you are, real and perfect and smiling, and me with the great and terrible audacity at thinking I know a thing about you. How dare I? Who gave me permission to speak?

Oh November, enfold me once in your cold, dry embrace, the brown of the dead and dying cutting stark shapes against the too, too pale sky. November do not leave me to the afterimage of white that will cover and drown me for months to come, after which it will be too late. November, we have mere moments to speak and to finish, moments before I have lost you to the seasonal funeral, the end before the endless rebirth. November, keep.

You rise and I watch you as you move about this room, which is the same as mine, might as well be mine, ought to be mine. The wallpaper and the paintings and the furniture all the same, all the trappings identical, who is to say your room is not mine, or that I am not some small and inadequate reflection of you? I watch you, and I am convinced you are not as real as I am, you are not as brittle. You are an abstract and an idea, a metaphor I have created for that which I am lacking. No, no! What am I saying? To be so conceited as to think I could create something such as you—no, no. Come back, come back to me, these thoughts are tedious and this bed is cold without you in it.

“I have to work,” you say, dressing yourself, and I am overcome with the strange notion of watching a film strip in reverse as all the tattered bits and pieces that make up your external wrappings seem to fly unnaturally back into place, covering the slim perfection that is you.

“Don’t go,” I murmur from my prison amidst the remnants of our dirty work.

You look at me, I am taken by your shape, more solid than me, greater than me. The days are slipping by too fast for me to know what to do but I must keep you here.

“You really aren’t what I expected at all,” you say, hands frozen in their grim places, lifting your shirt back into its grotesque position as a barrier between my fingers and your skin.

“I try not to be what people expect,” I say. “I’m not sure what it was you were expecting.”

“Drunk rich boy,” you say with a brutal shrug. You smile the whole remark away. “Do you want me to stay?”

Answering you is the final admission. I cannot bring myself to speak without your prompts, and this is as close as I can get.

“Yes,” I say. It is a beautiful word, yes. No one knows that. James Joyce knows that. You know it.

There is a breath of hesitation, and I am suspended on wire, but you catch me before I fall. “All right,” you say. You right yourself, replacing unnecessary fabrics in their rightful tangled heaps, and you slide back in next to me.

People are frightened to make this surrender, to accept this fortune. People come in from the cold and drown themselves in artificial light and warmth, and the assurance that they have made the right choice. We know better, you and I. We will stay here as long as it takes for one of us to know what this means, and I still don’t know who you are. There isn’t much time. I want to speak, to ask you, tell you. Sometime we shall ruin it all and dash it against the rocks of questions and answers and our too-solid identities. Sometime before the thirtieth day I shall have to break this beloved silence. Soon, soon, soon.