Paging Doctor Sigmund Freud
Hoo, boy. Anyone here want to take a crack at Rod Dreher's latest dream, featuring the Greek Poet C. P. Cavafy? I don't really want to waste my precious time analyzing, so I'll just list the first two things that came to my mind. The first is naturally the line from Pee-wee's Big Adventure wherein the famed protagonist begins a vocal recollection of a vivid dream scape before an interruption: "I'm all alone. I'm rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest..." That line cracks me up.
The second is a couple of lines from Lorca's Novena by the Pogues:
And Lorca the faggot poet they left till last
Blew his brains out with a pistol up his arse.
Man, I love that song. Here's a link if you want to give it a listen.
Rod ends with his recurring refrain "...you ought to be seeking out ways to live more in tune with a localist, Christian, agrarian way of life...." Well, I live in a locality, I know my neighbors and I have a garden, so I suppose I'm covered. But maybe I am still lacking something. Maybe I'll have a dream someday in which a gay poet tries to ply me with Belgian beer; no doubt only then I will understand that Jesus wants me to raise chickens in my backyard.
sometimes a beer bottle is just a beer bottle. sometimes it's not...
ReplyDeleteNever heard of Cavafy but I googled him. here's some stuff online:
ReplyDelete"Because Cavafy wrote in Greek, he is too often omitted from surveys of twentieth-century gay male literature. But such an omission is particularly unfortunate since Cavafy has written some of the greatest homoerotic poetry of all time.
Although some of the poems indicate guilty feelings about sex and others portray a world of one-night stands in seedy quarters, the overall tone of the entire canon is one of acceptance of gay male sexuality and a recognition that personal and artistic creativity can spring from what the bourgeois world may consider decadent or unrewarding encounters."
Maybe I'll have a dream someday in which a gay poet tries to ply me with Belgian beer; no doubt only then I will understand that Jesus wants me to raise chickens in my backyard.
ReplyDeleteROTFL!!!!!
Let's see: Dreher has a dream about a poet who's work he's never read, and it turns out to be a fascinating confirmation of what Dreher (allegedly) believes in the first place. Gee, what a surprise.
ReplyDeleteSo glad he shared.
"Maybe I'll have a dream someday in which a gay poet tries to ply me with Belgian beer"
ReplyDeletecan i just emphasize that it's a BOTTLE OF belgian beer? for some strange reason i feel compelled to point out this seemingly non-crucial detail. (BTW, in Dreher's own words, here's what Cavafy did with his bottle: "He took it in his hands and told me to look at it....")
that is all.
I wish we could all live in the mountains.
ReplyDeleteAt high altitudes.
Thats where I see myself in 5 years.
Then you'll have to change your nickname to SiliconMountainSteve.
ReplyDeleteMay God bless you with a long, localist, Christian mountain beard -- and may he abundantly multiply your goat herd.
LOL!!
ReplyDeleteWe actually did live in the mountains -- if you can call Vermont's Green Mountains "mountains." More like hills on steroids.
No goat herd, but we did love it. Unfortunately, though, you couldn't make a living there. Unless you inherited a big old dairy farm. Or maybe ran a Distance Healing Center. ;-)
That's the thing about mountains. They look pretty, but they don't have much in the way of a thriving economic base. Which makes putting food on the table a bit difficult. Or even having a table, for that matter.
High-larious.
ReplyDeletemore Dreher: "I've been thinking a lot over the past day about why I have such intensely strong emotional reactions to news about adultery, comparable to my fierce reactions to news about child abuse. It's perhaps a bit odd, because I grew up in a family in which no one committed adultery .... The best explanation I can come up with is that I am a papa bear about my wife and kids. I really am."
ReplyDeleteDreher's neurotic hysteria is only evidence of his moral superiority, you non-papa bears.
I'm interested to know whether Dreher believes his own propaganda or just feels it a matter of urgency to put his readers off the scent. I suspect its' a combination of both.
It's interesting to watch someone play mind games with himself for years on end.
And... the ultimate irony is that this post came less than a day after his soft-ball treatment of Michael "He Never Had A Chance" Jackson.
ReplyDelete