cul me by your name

there’s no point to this rant except to express about poetry. the book isn’t poetry, and i haven’t seen the film. i don’t want to see it.

expressive image making in prose doesn’t make a poetic prose. it makes a decorated prose. necessarily, since prose at heart is only a listing of facts. facts are useful things, but they don’t exist outside of their fact container. perhaps in a bleak prose, like bukowsky’s supposed poetry… maybe there a little bit of color might have an impact on the dull reader… take him by surprise: ‘this is poetry’.

the book is crap as lit. what is lit? probably, it’s the juxtaposition of the author’s private life experience and the reader’s reading experience. glued of course with the author’s reading and writing experience into a multi-sensual fiberboard of life-like dialoging — i mean explicitly, ‘the creation of a special language’ to talk story. maybe in henry james, where james is concerned with character and not just with appearing to, and talking of, play the rules of the game, of high society’s game. i mean, james critiqued the social order. call me by your name just gossips about it. imagine le grand meulnes merged with a la recherche, but then reduced to a ginsberg ‘gay’ gossip about who was fucking whom?

but, we’re about learning. i learned from the book. it allowed me to accept that there are narcissist fucks in the world who are amoral and are very attractive to little emos like me… oversensitive boys like me, who need moral authority. the book also allowed me to admit that not every sensitive boy who likes other boys is more than just another guy looking for flesh. i mean, i’m queer because i’m creative, not the other way around. i’d be queer for the older boy because i wanted to find out his truth and its source, and what it actually meant in the world: is strong all that it’s about? is having someone strong love me my actuality as human? the gay lobby seems to be saying that someone loving them is their biological actuality. i don’t agree. being highly creative means you’re perceptive in and on several sense realms at once. touch has the least sense content. touch offers immediate body consciousness — body’s thought. probably, it’s more that my queer is that i’m queer for music, in the way we’d be alternatively called ‘musical’ instead of queer or faggot. maybe we just liked the term because it was easier to create with than the dismissive ‘invert’. ‘invert’ gets kind of personal. nobody in call me is invert. in fact, nothing’s really personal in the novel. the boy-boy is a collection of memories and the man-boy is a dildo created for the boy-boy. nobody really talks in the book. people explain, but that’s because the dialog and plots are lifted from any literature the author might quote so that a new yorker critic might twitch. the dialog has to explain why the lit references aren’t references at all, but ‘authentic experience talked of in literary dialect.’ the kid’s background, the books he’s supposed to have read. the interesting people who’ve stayed at the house, talking and acting in literary. being a poet, i have to assume that the book is a picture of the author writing the book. there are too many style shoots in this book for me. it’s distracting. does the boy need to become someone or not? ‘becoming someone’ isn’t really on the table anymore. ‘becoming satisfied’ is how it happens now. even the dialog of overcoming your father’s authority isn’t even… the man-boy becomes father, normal and necessary for the boy’s psychology, no? yet the father in this isn’t really told as a weak and worthless father. why would the boy need an idealized father? because of the man-boy’s physical authority? that’s not played out in the book. because the man-bot is a cosmic twin? the completion of the boy-bot’s doubts into action? — terry’s foster brother teaches him not to be afraid of horses?  monterlant? not here, not in the finzi-contini’s garden.

i’m ranting. i don’t know how to call you by your name. but, the book is successful for me because it’s a dumpster of  partial ideas in their primal state — not yet glued into action figures. the ‘gay’ thing. well, gay is pretty much just narcissistic — i mean, the gay of  appearance. the book isn’t queer. ‘naked lunch’ is queer — it never allows itself to call anything by any name to only fetch it. to fetch sex or money, or bud-lite in a gay bar. i’m a high-functioning retard — i sort of, i’ll say, have a woman and man’s brain functions at once. neurologically, i’m crossed over side to side and front to back. i see a lot and hear a lot, and i can do a lot with what i receive. and, nothing is settled for me except provisionally. for me, the book i’d want would be, ‘show me what’s your name’ and nobody’d read it.