Screenwriter William Monahan's thoughts on Heroin

So, a little bit sad this week that Philip Seymour Hoffman has passed away from an overdose of heroin. Whether playing Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games, or Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he was my kind of actor. He played shady, cerebral, and captivating characters. Sad that he had to die. But this sort of thing happens. Aaron Sorkin did an obituary for the guy in Time that was touching and discussed the dangers of a heroin habit. Another screenwriter named William Monahan had some interesting things to say himself about heroin usage when he published "Heroin: What Your Uncle Ted Doesn't Know About It" in New York Press back in 1995. Read his article, as it's entertaining and thought provoking, as most of what Mr. Monahan writes turns out to be:

William Monahan. "Heroin: What Your Uncle Ted Doesn't Know About It", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 17 (April 26–May 2, 1995), pp. 1, 18-20.

There's a school of thought about heroin, which has it that unless you've spent time scratching your scabs in a hovel, wrecked your life, and ended up a last-ditch gutter-Calvinist confessing your condition of permanent villainy before a hall of applauding losers, you're not allowed to say anything about it.

You haven't been there or something; you don't know what the fuck you're talking about; you're not allowed to have an opinion about heroin unless you have (or at least give lip service to) the received one, which is that it will fuck your life sidewards, is invariably addictive and ought to be avoided at all costs. And if you use it you've got like deep personal problems.

This is curious. The supposed expert on heroin isn't the person who uses it sensibly every once in a while, same as he uses bourbon or nicotine or coffee, who can take it or leave it. The expert on heroin isn't even a functioning junkie. The expert on heroin, believe it or not, is somebody who got flamed by it, had to be grappled off to detox. It's more difficult than it should be to point out that this is a lot of bullshit.

Say the subject under discussion was the stock market. You're a guy with brains and a few stray bucks. You read the financial weather right, venture successfully, turn a tidy profit and back out of the market in a disciplined way after having gotten what you wanted. You can take or leave the stock market, you're careful with it, you're aware that it can fuck you. So you play the market cogently, occasionally, and win.

Sounds to me like you're the expert, rather than some busted fuck in for securities fraud, mopping the rec room in federal prison. 

But that's not the way it is with heroin. The talk about heroin has been co-opted by either nervous nellies who are afraid of everything, or victims who should have been. People who ride the tiger successfully are for some reason less pertinent than people who got mauled and had an arm torn off by the tiger --yet couldn't stop getting on it, despite having no talent for that particular ride. They're not really the people to be holding forth on tiger riding, but they do.

Heroin's a dangerous, attractive and highly addictive drug. But if you know that going in, and if you're not an idiot, you can use it carefully, extract pleasure, not get addicted and have a wonderful, controlled experience with a folk medicine as old as recorded history--and which, in my opinion, ought to be legal.

Of course everything ought to be legal, except stealing, assault, libel, slander, usury and murder. But a perfect society would be far too simple. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Until recently (the relevant U.S. narcotics act came in 1914, just before that other ultra-sensible experiment in parochial morals, Prohibition) people have always taken opiates whenever they felt like it. They had every right to do so, and their reasons were various, and pretty much up to the individual, which sounds socially optimal to me.

Ancient Thebes was famous for being surrounded by fast fields of poppies. You could cop anywhere in Thebes. Thebans used opium for the same reason the guy staring into his coffee at the next table just snorted a bag in the bathroom: it feels nice to be opiated. It's a relief from ordinary existence, which is a nice trick and necessary to human beings, even when your existence is just damned fine to begin with.

Your Uncle Ted who likes to unwind with 50 scotches after work and never misses a chance to complain about those damned people with their damned drugs, would be profoundly impressed by heroin. If you've done heavy opiates just like the average Theban, Queen Victoria and Perky Bysshe, you're a couple up on your Uncle Ted. It's more than country-club unwind; opiates are the classical Lethe, the waters of oblivion. And there's nothing wrong with that, in cogent moderation. There never has been.

Your Uncle Ted with his scotches tries for it by legal means, but he doesn't get it. What he gets is a divorce and a distended liver.

I came across a great recipe for oblivion the other day. No, it wasn't a shotgun, which is a bit permanent. It was a Brompton Cocktail. It was first concocted in the last century at Brompton Hospital in London. This "cocktail," which is still given to terminal cancer patients, is basically an alcoholic suspension of Class A narcotics. These are the ingredients:

BROMPTON COCKTAIL

Heroin

Morphine

Cocaine

Gin

How'd you like to knock back a few of those men? There's definitely no fucking around with a Brompton Cocktail. You're doing a cannonball into the River of Forgetfulness with that gentleman, that obvious prince of drinks. Finish a day's work? Or can't finish a day's work, but can't work any more? Mind still racing? Pacing up and down and blowing 500 cigarettes? Haven't slept for two days? Have a Brompton Cocktail.

You see, I not only think that people ought to get fucked up once a week, I think they ought to get as fucked up as possible. If you do it on liquor you have a good chance of ending up smashing furniture, insulting someone important or waking up in a bed with someone you would have never tolerated if you were sober. In the end, as every smart drinker discovers, liquor's unesthetic. I don't like marijuana, either. So what do you do?

Well, if you're an old fart, you can go down and whimper about arthritis and get a scrip for Percs. If you're young, you could go in with your arm torn off, and the doctor would still look unhappy before scribbling a scrip for Tylenol Three. Liquor sucks, pot's dumb, crack's for boneheads, coke makes everything worse. But Lethe is still necessary every once in a blue moon, same as it was to the Thebans, same as it was to Keats, same as it was to 18th-Century ladies slugging patent medicines. So what drug do you opt for? Same one they did.

There are two ways to obtain opium from the Oriental poppy (Papaver somniferum). By the first method, the entire plant can be collected and chopped into "opium straw," then cooked down and treated. That's a method used by the pharmaceutical companies, and largely disregarded by those in the illicit trade. 

The easiest way to get opium is the way it's been done since Demeter sought Persephone and lost her way in a garden of soporific flowers. One makes a laceration in the unripe seed-pod of the opium poppy. It exudes a milky resin, which dries into a gummy dark brown mass: raw opium, the most important drug in the history of the world.

How it has evolved into its current status on the Lower East Side is a little more complex. In 1805 a German chemist named Seturner, working in the provincial town of Paderborn, got upset by the unreliability, the un-German sloppiness, of market preparations of laudanum, and decided to try to isolate the active ingredient. He mixed opium with ammonia and observed that crystals formed then. He treated the crystals with sulfuric acid and alcohol. What he came up with was an alkaloid he named Morphium, after the God of Dreams. (It was the Romantic Age.)

Seturner caught mice, dogs, and other poor innocent animals, gave them Morphium and observed their reactions. Some people call this incredible brutality, others, of course, call it the scientific method. Anyone who thinks that it's appalling and inexcusable perhaps should sign a binding paper that they refuse to be given any of Seturner's Morphium when they're dying (like we all probably will) of cancer.

When Seturner found out how much of his Morphium it took to kill a large animal (yes, he did this by killing a large animal, so that he wouldn't kill anything that might produce a sonata), he and his friends then took lesser doses themselves. Hooray! This was dangerous, as well as fun, and Seturner OD'd one day while stolidly and Teutonically pushing the envelope. He took a grain and a half of Morphium (three times the maximum sensible dose), and fell over trying to dip his pen into the inkwell to record his observations.

Morpheus let him off, at least partially: Seturner survived to win every scientific award in creation, and to become (there are arguments about this, but I don't want to hear them) the world's first morphine addict. Why? Because it felt good and he wasn't careful.

The molecules of opiates, when introduced into the body, mimic the structure of enkephalins, or endorphins, which suppress pain by occupying certain receptor sites or nerve cells. Endorphins, as almost every running junkie or nice, normal health fascist could tell you, are released by exercise, shock, pain or exhaustion. They flood into the system when, during exercise, you go through the pain barrier. (Which you really have to be crazy to do, by the way.) It takes a long time and it hurts, but finally comes the easeful flood of junk.

A runner (rubber band in mouth as she makes a practical ponytail, then rigs the keys, mace, rape whistle) will fudge this endorphin-reward explanation for her behavior, but I used to run (believe it or not), and it's usually the case that what you're after is the pleasure that comes when you've hurt yourself enough. It's a natural little reward that Nature has for the sprinting maniac in the gel shoes. If you get through the point where any normal person would stop running if he wasn't being chased by a Bengal tiger or a horde of pen-waving virgins in black-and-white Beatles film, you get a burst of narcotic exhilaration exactly like being on heroin. That sense of well-being also happens, curiously, when you fall down a rock slope, get punched in the head by someone's spouse or break your pelvis snowboarding.

We all know the sensation, the sort of ok goody feeling you get when you're seriously injured. In the case of traumatic physical injury there's a dreamlike and opiated interval before whatever real-time pain you're in for organizes itself and arrives like a bailiff. T.E. Lawrence, an odd cat whichever way you whipped him, could have told you that endorphins are released by a good whipping followed by a Turkish gang rape. If you've ever been in a fistfight and taken punches--and especially if you've lost a fistfight and been knocked down--you know that there's a point when it feels good. What it feels like (and I know this empirically, so don't fuck with me) is like being on heroin. Ever notice men make up after a fight? That atmosphere of saccharine Aw, you're an okay guy bonhomie? It's because everything's all right. You're virtually warmed with charity and warmth and love. Whatever testosterone and adrenaline and malevolence got you into this in the first place, in the aftermath, you're junked to the tits.

Your ex-girlfriend who did 2000 stomach crunches instead of having a drink like a regular guy? She was on heroin. The guy standing up trembling from the weight bench? He's fucked up on junk. Ever come back from skiing feeling sensual, tired, calm, benign, replete? You're on opium. What you've done, up there in Vermont, is spent a fortune for a bundle of sensations you can buy for 10 bucks off E. Houston St.

Seturner's Morphium or morphine didn't catch on generally for recreational use in the Romantic Age. The cheap and available drug of choice continued to be opium, in the form of alcoholic tinctures, ranging from the black drop the Quakers made in England (yes, the Quakers took time off from prayer and being persecuted to turn a buck as drug dealers) to various commercial cordials, carminatives and elixirs, which the working classes (Hogarth had it only partially right) frequently preferred to gin.

It was cheaper than gin, and it delivered more of what they wanted, which was Lethe: relief from the ordinary self. Tinctures of opium, in the form of "quieting syrups," were often given to working-class infants, before their mothers slogged off to the dark Satanic mills back there at the birth of the modern. Obviously there were overdoses. Children died; lots of people died. Seturner had chosen Morpheus as his patron, but it might as well have been Thanatos.

Last summer I was in a cemetery on Nantucket, reading headstones, and observed how many sea captains of the early mid-19th Century had outlived a number of wives. It struck me that the high rate of death for women in childbirth in the late 18th and early 19th Century may have had more to do with lavish dispensation of uncontrolled opiates, rather than any obstetrical mishaps. The suspiciously pale and neurasthenic ladies of the Romantic Age died in childbirth all the time.

I think the reason was probably laudanum. The poor thing with narrow hips of popular 19th-Century fashion probably went out less often with a Melanie Wilkes Christlike blessing and hemorrhage than with pinpoint pupils, a cold dusky skin and paralysis of breathing owing to narcotic poisoning. Women used more opium than men, and they got addicted recreationally out of boredom (I can see that: imagine sitting around the Dickinson house without getting fucked up) and through treatment of female complaints.

Long before you had to fumble with the childsafe Pamprin, there was actual Lethe. Laudanum was so good for the monthlies that women took it all the time; and when you started to really hurt, like in childbirth, you took more.

Byron used opium, but he was far from a fan, and reported that it, like alcohol, made him moody and suspicious, and that on the whole he preferred a dose of salts. On this evidence I think he might have been a cocaine man (the way the governor of Masschusetts and Pete Wilson's future vice president is a bourbon man), but coca was still mainly being chewed in leaf form by Amerindians dragging llamas up slopes. Shelly adored opium: it cured his nervous headache, which was probably a migraine, probably caused (like weep St. Kurt's dodgy stomach) by using narcotics in the first place. Charles Lamb took opium whenever he had a cold: (That sentence looks like "Charles Lamb took opium whenever he could," which is probably more like it.)

Keats wrote: "My heart aches , and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains./One minute past and Letheward had sunk..." The miracle of negative capability for the moment aside, what we have here is Keats on the nod.

While I was looking through some books on heroin--even the most adult ones seemed written in some sense for children--I came across one that really was written for children: Heroin, apparently funded by public money (a million here on unproved theories, a billion there, who gives a fuck, as long as it looks like we're Doing Something) composed by some modern equivalent of Parson Weems during the last legs of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No era.

Nancy Reagan was a major pillster, by the way, but she didn't want kids or Negroes to feel as good as she did when stoned off her ass on scrip dope and being pinned into a $50,000 war frock that she'd scammed free off some social-climbing 7th Ave. type. So, while crammed with the sort of drugs that rich, enfranchised old bags do, she had a little campaign against the sort of drugs that poor, disenfranchised people do. It was all right for Nancy to pop everything in the cabinet before tottering off to disgrace the United States by illogically curtseying to the Queen of fucking England (I never got over this personally), but it wasn't (and isn't) all right for you to get drugs without being some old clam who's married to the president.

The campaign, you'll recall, was huge, and part of it was this odd children's book Heroin--which contains some surprisingly useful information. If the average at-risk 12-year-old didn't know how to chase the dragon before reading Heroin, he'd know enough afterwards to save the flex straw from milk break and cop some tin foil off Mom. Also, it would tune his cop-radar ("Heroin is an illegal drug in every country. If you are caught carrying it, you are in big trouble."). But mainly Heroin reads like any pseudo-informative "hard-hitting" let's-save-the-world/American-family/Aryan-race propaganda primer. For example:

Heroin is often sold by people who are already addicted to it. They tell you that heroin can solve your problems, and that it isn't really dangerous. They are lying.

Sure. Take that first sentence and substitute "Communism" for "heroin," and we pretty much know where we are with this book. As far as drug dealers doing a door-to-door salesman thing, corrupting unwary youth with false promises, have you ever heard a drug dealer do anything but whisper "Express, Express" to people who are already looking for it? I haven't. Those damned drug dealers of popular public fiction have a curious (and important) resemblance to the dark character Goodman Brown met in the woods. No one's battling drugs here--they're battling Satan.

Heroin is taken by millions of people all over the world. Some of these--draw close, Dick and Jane--are already what you might call "junkies"-in bad health, dirty clothes, no jobs, nowhere to live.

Well, be fair, some people might call them "junkies." Others, of course, call them "Musicians."
Others seem like ordinary people who you think would never touch the stuff.

The reason, Dick and Jane, they seem like ordinary people even though they do heroin is because they are ordinary people who incidentally do heroin. But it's not in Heroin's order of business to amplify this disturbing contradiction. Instead, it throws in reprints of tabloid headlines like HEROIN BRIT WILL HANG and HANGED: Women Sob as Drug Brit Goes to the Gallows.

There may be normal people doing heroin, you see, but it gets you homeless or hanged. Why do people take heroin? Nancy Reagan's Voltaire knows: They take it because, for a short while, it seems to bring pleasure and calmness... But the peace and relaxation of heroin are false.

That's not true. There's nothing false about heroin's effect of mental and physical relaxation. GUINNESS GETS YOU DRUNK, and HEROIN RELAXES. But what society is battling here is Old Scratch, the father of lies, with his sinuous attractions, the things he shows from the mountaintop. It'd be a bit better if they simply said, "Dear Kids, people do heroin because it feels good, and it does feel good, but if you're not careful you can get really fucked up (if you're, like, predisposed to get fucked up), and you should never carry too much of it in Malaysia..." But no one's less interested in the truth about drugs than someone in a war against them.

Heroin may make you feel different for a short time but in no way is it a solution. It's a chemical that affects the brain. It is not a way of handling the tougher parts of life.

Well yeah. Neither is French cooking, drinking decent wine or reading novels late at night when you're due at work at nine, yet some people go fucking off into illogical and destructive excesses in those departments, too. It's like saying we ought to ban Parcheesi because your aunt went mad for it in the 1930s. The others, who are capable of moderation, don't they count? Not when society's a mad dad, and we're all his children.

Why do people get addicted? I don't know. You don't know, either. We don't even know what addiction is. Everybody says they know what addiction is, but we don't even know if there's really such a thing as addiction--that is, a physiological need that is dissimilar from an undisciplined voluptuary craving. The concept of addiction, like the concept of God, is a way out of a mystery. Substances, neutral in themselves, are named evils. There's nothing intrinsically evil about a glass of scotch there on the table, or a bit of white dust on the edge of a credit card. If you can't stop doing something, whose fault is it?

The standard (hysterical) figure on rates of addiction is that out of every 10 people who so much as try heroin, two become addicted. I almost wrote "hopelessly" addicted, and that's symptomatic of the perceptual problem. No one's ever hopelessly addicted to anything. In fact, if you can kick a thing, armed with nothing more than willpower, over any given weekend--which you can do with heroin even if you've done it for 20 years--are you actually addicted in any sense worth naming?

Addicts of the schooled sort deal with not having any individual responsibility by in some sense giving up individuality itself. There's a little psychological trick in the Anonymous thing: it's an abdication. If it works, of course, it works, but I don't like religions. I don't like people not figuring things out for themselves.

Heroin-diacetylmorphine, the interesting ingredient in the Brompton Cocktail and the stuff that had me pinned and wigged the other day crossing Union Square with sunglasses on, is produced by treating Herr Seturner's Morphium with acetic anhydride. That may look like the name of a cab driver to whom you have to give explicit directions, but it's some sort of chemical.

Heroin was once used medicinally to relieve pain and diarrhea, to suppress coughing spasms, and as a cure for morphine addiction. The only way it could cure morphine addiction, pretty obviously, is by forming a heroin addiction.

Heroin is an effective little preparation of opium. Since the government and that nation, stuffed with hypocrites and Christian wing-nuts, think you're not grown-up or smart enough to decide when, or when not to use folk medicine, you now have to be awfully careful with the stuff you get on the street, on account of it coming from criminals, rather than off the shelf in the form of Mrs. Goolsby's Cordial.

Not long ago, instead of coffee and a cigarette and starting to worry and work as usual, I got out of bed, had a beer, and snorted some heroin. A good deal less expensive than going snorkeling in Jamaica--which, in terms of hedonistic release, it resembled.

Keith Richards (your man to trust in the matter) described heroin really well: he said it was like you'd been out in the cold your entire life, and suddenly you'd come into a warm room. You know how you haven't felt really good since you were five or six? Always some small nagging pain, your back hurts, your career is totally out of control, you don't have a career?

On heroin, you can feel marvelous about not having anything going for you, which is why some people keep doing it, just like others do religion. If you do actually have something going for you, all you have to worry about from heroin is feeling marvelous physically--at the center of pleasure, in a warm room, utterly relaxed. One's anxiety level on heroin is so low you could have a gun stuck in your face and not give a shit; it's what the full range of legal antidepressants try for, unsuccessfully.

You think it's decadent, and bad, an invariably dangerous and subhuman and wrong? Well it isn't. It's illegal, but so is driving too fast or opening diplomatic relations with Cuba. It's very human to do opiates when you feel like it--that is, if you can get opiates, which isn't too hard in New York.

Sure, before the day was over I ended up vaulting out of a tea shop and puking into a dirty snowbank, but I spent most of the day feeling like His Most Serene Highness the King of Spain translated to heaven and getting a tag-team blowjob from Cibo and Matto on his birthday. and I'm telling you I needed it.

I managed half a cup of tepid tea. I sat there for a while, pupils pinned, talking rubbish, started staring at something on the table, and then nearly nodded off again, and then sat upright with a jolt. At that point I felt something like a soft alligator trying fairly discreetly to get out of my stomach. I excused myself, pushed out of the restaurant, and wobbled a little way down the sidewalk. I hung out for a while in a fairly sophisto way by a trash barrel, and then leaned over and vomited about four quarts of tan scum. 

It was painless. It was almost nice. Dope-puke. It was 30 degrees outside on the street and I'd left my leather coat inside, but I wasn't cold. In fact, the February wind, which should have been lacerating and intolerable, felt like a balmy tropical breeze. As far as sensations were concerned, I was on vacation, had just played some tennis, had a champagne lunch, and was wearing sunglasses on the beach, at an expensive resort, shortly after being voted in unanimously, to thunderous applause, as Emperor of the Universe.

The next day I was normal.

John Lennon once said in an interview that he'd always needed a drug to survive. A lot of us do, for one reason or another. You can't always be falling in love or making art or climbing Everest or calmly considering a beautiful landscape or running a marathon. As Prozac users and their doctors could tell you, there's nothing wrong and a good deal psychologically right with chemical relaxation.

People go off like raped apes if you say that heroin feels nice and might actually be as harmless as cheeseburgers, handled properly. I'd go a bit further and state that if heroin can indeed be "nice" at the beginning, it can obviously be damned nice in moderation. People are afraid to say that. That's reason enough to say it.

And so, the readers of New York Press did go off like raped apes. For weeks in the letters columns. It's a great essay.

The latest on William Monahan's "Tripoli" and "The Essex" scripts

Collider.com really knows how to get a good interview out of scribe William Monahan. This is what they got out of him most recently about his The Essex and Tripoli scripts (I've done my own reporting on these scripts):

Excerpted from "Exclusive: William Monahan Talks LONDON BOULEVARD, THE DEPARTED Sequel, SIN CITY 2, THE GAMBLER, MOJAVE, TRIPOLI, More":

If you could make a period piece in any period that’s not the 12^thcentury, when would you choose?

Monahan: The era I love most is the Federal period, just after the Revolution and the formation of the United States. The birth of America as a nation coincided with the Romantic era and I’ve always been thoroughly into the Romantics and I’ve always been thoroughly into America, particularly at the time when it was a brand new idea, when it was something brand new in the world. It was a very exciting time in the world because of the birth of America. It’s also an interesting period in which to look at the United States because it’s a period in which the United States was an underdog. An underdog nation with no Navy, and of course that’s what Tripoli is about. Tripoli is set in 1804. The Essex, which would be a mammoth production, is set in the War of 1812.  Tripoli isn’t really an epic. Tripoli is a tragic drama enacted in the open air on the coast of North Africa. I don’t think there’s ever more than 100 people on screen at one time throughout the entire picture. It’s not quite the titanic picture one thinks. It could be done for 30. You can get epic effects without epic expenses. I think in Tripoli, the only possible CG thing would be the Constitution opening fire on Tripoli.

Who owns the rights right now?

Monahan: For one reason or another, Tripoli never officially went into turn-around at Fox because of some paperwork snafu. So we’re in a situation where the underlying rights,  which means the original script, reverted to me. Fox owns what are referred to as “sterile drafts,” which means they own these further development drafts but they’re not able to do anything with them. Sooner or later, it’s going to be an issue and we have to come to some sort of arrangement.

Where is William Monahan?

William Monahan is a "has been" at this point. I state that with some hope that he'll prove me wrong. Sadly, that's not going to happen. I personally feel that screenwriter William Monahan has already done his best work and everything going forward will be derivative. That's if there is anything going forward.

Time to look back on his career, starting with his epistolary series, Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. I recently had to go through the Internet's Wayback Machine to find these stories again. I'm proud of my work in bringing Dining Late back to life, restoring the portraits of Claude La Badarian that appeared in the original New York Press run, and my blog entries decrypting the autobiographical elements in it. With New York Press being terminally ill, the only way to reliably read the Dining Late series now is through the Wayback Machine or a visit to the New York Public Library.

Take a gander at my restoration of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian and write up your own comments on it.

Videos of Alan Cabal performing in White Courtesy Telephone!

Note the exclamation mark at the end of the title of this blog entry? That represents excitement! White Courtesy Telephone band member Bucky Dave has released several videos of live concerts the band put on last century. Catch long-haired Alan Cabal on vocals occasionally bullying Rob Tannenbaum. Watch these videos now:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBuckyberg

Dave Eggers and his 'Fuck essay'

Not making much of an effort anymore, am I? I haven't been lazy. I just can't immerse myself in researching all things William Monahan with the same vigor that I used to be able to summon to the task. Something has been blocking me from producing the cutting edge scholarship that I've become known for. I've definitely been repressing the fact that anything that I write about New York Press ultimately has to do with screenwriter William Monahan. He was my first love out of all the New York Press writers. Forgive me for saying that, please, but I'm hoping that with that embarrassing personal admission behind me, I can finally get to writing about author Dave Eggers' 'Fuck essay.' This has not been going well. To play it safe, I'm going to keep making as many embarrassing personal admissions as it takes to get this blog entry finally finished. Sorry Dave Eggers, although perfectly brilliant, commenting on your 'Fuck essay' has really been quite painful for me.

Most of the pain came from researching the publication history of this fucking essay. Oh yeah, real juicy details to be found there. It was published in three places?^2-4 Oh my lord! How did that come to be? Could that be interesting? It wasn't! The 'Fuck essay' was published three times! Almost four times! It was originally set to be published in Might issue #17 had the magazine lasted one more issue. But Might folded.¹ New York Press ended up publishing the 'Fuck essay' instead. Then Metro got a hold of it. Finally, it was included in a collection of Might essays titled Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp. I tried emailing John Strausbaugh, the former editor of New York Press, to get a comment from him. We've had our conversations about New York Press before but the subject of the 'Fuck essay' was not going to be one of them.

Blah, blah, blah... William Monahan... blah, blah, blah... William Monahan. He needs to be constantly on my mind if I wish to continue to work in the world of New York Press scholarship. If you read through Mr. Monahan's reviews in Bookforum magazine you'll find that he has actually said a few things about Dave Eggers. This is helping me right now. Mr. Monahan refers to Mr. Eggers as a "primary artist", which at the time was apt because Mr. Eggers was becoming The New Big Thing in Literature. Everyone wanted to write like him. At least this is what I gather from Mr. Monahan's cautionary advice. He advises writers imitating Mr. Eggers' style to look into what has historically happened to their kind "when the ambitious and resourceful primary artist evolves beyond them." Grabbing these acolytes by the throat, Mr. Monahan advises them in a snooty, erudite voice that "Knowledge of literature is very useful." I can imagine Mr. Monahan, lakeside, on a Sunday afternoon, watching a man recently ejected from his kayak, who is desperately trying to keep from drowning, and chuckling to his friend Mike Ruffino, Knowledge of swimming is very useful.⁵

Despite that, Mr. Monahan is a sensitive guy, as is Mr. Eggers, but while Mr. Monahan portrays himself as a very hard man, Mr. Eggers seems to have fun with his overly sensitive side. Although the title of his 'Fuck essay', "Never Fucked Anyone," seems to imply an intact virginity, Mr. Eggers is actually about to take you on a journey through the very lush world of his sex life. He goes off on those who describe the intimacy of sexual intercourse as mere "fucking." Oh boy, Dave Eggers is obviously not any sort of badboy. Characterizing sexual intercourse as "fucking" seems to be too crude for him. Fair enough. And that's essentially what Mr. Eggers' 'Fuck essay' is all about.

When, in 1997, "Never Fucked Anyone" was finally available for reading, in an issue of New York Press no less, it generated quite a few letters in the following weeks. People--the oddball letter writerers of New York Press--could really relate to Mr. Eggers' sensitivity toward using the word 'fuck' as a verb, particularly when it describes having had sex with someone. It was a hit! You need those every once in a while.

Ahem. Let me just take a paragraph now to address a few of my friends. Hi guys! I know you think my blog is really lame and only read it so that you have further material to mock me with, but anyhow, this is for you: remember that cute froshie last week, the one with the really caring eyes, the sweetheart. Well, I fucked her after the party. I've since fucked her a few times. I will continue to fuck, poke, obliterate her, or whatever verb best conveys the animal that is released from within me when we have sexual intercourse. I know you thought I didn't have a chance with her. You guys were wrong. We're suited. Please don't show her this.

Was that disrespectful, improper, deviant? That's the kind of usage of the verb 'fuck' that Mr. Eggers finds distasteful. So he wrote a whole fucking essay about it. For a time, it was legend in certain hipster circles. It may be largely forgotten now.

I understand where Mr. Eggers is coming from. I don't usually characterize "the deed" as "fucking". But other, less sensitive twentysomethings, like my friends, definitely do characterize an intimate moment with a lover as "fucking."

For your reading pleasure, I excerpt the introduction to the NYPress version of Mr. Egger's 'Fuck essay' below.³ You'll have to switch over to the Metro version of the essay toward the end of this excerpt to continue reading the 'Fuck essay' since I don't want to violate copyright by excerpting the entire essay, which would be publishing. So I'll help you make that transition toward the end of this blog entry, or you could just read the Metro version from the beginning, which has a different introduction that isn't as highbrow but good nonetheless.

Ah, the rock'em, sock'em, explosive art world of New York in the 80s. Could you stand the excitement? It was palpable, no? Auction prices ever higher, Japanese bidders snapping up Van Goghs for what it would cost to buy a pyramid. Speculation, speculation: Longo and Schnabel and Fischl selling their stuff for $100,000 before it was dry. Yes, it was a heady time. Money and art and fame and even more money—as sexy as a David Salle diptych, and without the misogynistic aftertaste. It screamed novelization.

But still, it's been over 10 years and we've had virtually nothing. Seems a cinch for Tom Wolfe—collate The Painted Word and The Bonfire of the Vanities and you've got something, no doubt. But no such luck. Instead, we have only the bizarre residual side projects of the period's A-list. Robert Longo's, um, darkly prophetic Johnny Mnemonic, Salle's movie that no one saw, Schnabel's Basquiat and the singing career, clearly a cry for help. To date, we have heard so little about the era itself, of lives lived in that lustrous time.

Until now. With Fernanda Eberstadt's When the Songs of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, released a few months ago, the Knopf publicists promised the first novel-y look at the culture of the art world's boom time. And though the canvas is a bit smaller than advertised—it really doesn't go too far into the market as a whole, and the references to actual people are clouded—it's still a good book. Kind of a lame third act, but really great most of the way. In it, we meet the Geblers, a Manhattan family of unconscionable wealth, whose matriarch, Dolly Gebler, presides over the Aurora Foundation, a non-profit art space made possible by the family's fortune, created in Chicago by her father, in pharmaceuticals. Presiding over the foundation, Dolly is brilliant, domineering and cooly passionate about art. Her taste runs toward the minimal—she decorates her home with work by Stella and Agnes Martin—and her life is similarly ordered. She has settled into middle age with three teenage children and has come to terms with being attached to an infantile, adulterous husband. For fun she surrounds herself with artists and writers and such, and at her parties, everyone's fabulously rich and well-bred and articulate, and they all speak in wonderful, quip-laden prose. One finds "the Renaissance overrated," another deems "the young people of today so censorious," while another finds the pato negro "a bit gamey."

Meanwhile, across the city, we are following the plight of one Isaac Hooker, a rough-hewn castaway from New Hampshire, an almost-homeless painter of unrefined talent but great passion. He's also a Harvard dropout, and like all Harvard men speaks like the brilliant rogue in a Victorian drawing room. When he is displeased with an avant garde opera about the Trojan War—one that Dolly, through Autora, has sponsored—he lets a guest at the post-party know what he thinks: "[For] everyone to everybody to stand around gushing about the lighting is to accede to her meretricious pretentious gall in lobotomizing one of the most heartrending stories in Greek tragedy."

After 300 or so pages of setup, Dolly and Isaac finally fall in love. She is attracted to his intensity and becomes infatuated with his primitive and sensual artwork, full of allegory and religious imagery. He responds to her loving encouragement, and to some extent the allure of her money and power. Soon there are the Central Park walks, the weekends at the house on the North Fork, the clandestine meetings at his dingy studio. For a fleeting while we are convinced that they are meant to be. Their relationship is lustful but tender and respectful, and we imagine that she's found a new life at middle age, and that he's found love and stability in Dolly 20 years his senior.

But then something happens on page 357, really deep into the novel, actually, that sort of sticks out, and changes the feel of things. The two have been meeting often, sometimes at hotels—"the St. Moritz or the Pierre"—and during of one their encounters, Isaac muses on his good fortunes: "[He] could not resist these wayward autumn afternoons decanting into evening. The delectable melancholy of lying on crumpled hotel sheets, watching ever-diminishing reflections of Dolly in the bath, and wondering if he couldn't fuck her once more before he dropped her home."

Did you flinch? I flinched. I flinched, and then I was troubled. It really came from nowhere, that word, "fuck," used as it was, as a verb. Isaac and Dolly are no doubt in some sort of love, and have a certain clear respect for each other. They talk endlessly about art and philosophy and literature, treat each other to various kindnesses. But when Isaac thinks of her sexually, he wonders if he can "fuck her once more before he drop[s] her home."

And so I wondered why it was that Isaac wanted to "fuck" Dolly. I wondered what Eberstadt meant there. Had I missed something in their relationship, in Isaac's character? I guess he was supposed to be sort of tough, kind of unrefined in his manners, but essentially he's a sensitive, intellectual, artsy type. So then why does he want to "fuck" her? Nothing in the text until that point led me to believe that Isaac would, while having an affair with a 50-year-old heiress and mother of three, look at her and hope to "fuck" her. It leapt out. After that, reading the book became about trying to decipher the meaning of that word's appearance, and the other times when Eberstadt used words like "pussy" and "prick" and "gash" in the middle of her otherwise genteel prose.

And just as the book became about that word, so will this essay, which really has nothing to do with Eberstadt's book, or novelizations of the 80s art world. It's about that word, "fuck," and what I'm saying is that I have a problem with using that word. As a verb.

Every language must have its profanity, and "fuck" is our most astringent and versatile specimen. I use the word all the time...

END OF EXCERPT. Now follow this link to the Metroactive website and find the paragraph beginning "Every language must have its profanity" to continue reading. Enjoy!

Take-away question: Are there any other contributions to NYPress by Dave Eggers, other than his "Fuck" essay and a cheeky letter in the NYPress letters column in which he complains that John Strausbaugh has incorrectly described his literary journal McSweeney's as a "zine".^6-7

Sources:

1) "Foreword: We Tried.", Shiny Adidas tracksuits and the death of camp: and other essays from Might magazine. 1998. New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, p. xi. QUOTE: "5) A few of the essays included herein never actually made it to print in Might. The thing about the word 'fuck' and the thing about nail polish were both scheduled to run in Might #17, but then we folded and they were left homeless. The 'fuck' thing did end up being published in the New York Press, while the nail polish thing appears for the first time here."
2) Dave Eggers. "Never Fucked Anyone", Shiny Adidas tracksuits and the death of camp: and other essays from Might magazine. 1998. New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, pp. 97-112.
3) Dave Eggers. "A Tough Look at an Ugly Verb: I've Never Fucked Anyone", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 26 (June 25-July 1, 1997), pp. 1, 34-37.
4) Dave Eggers."The Problem with an Ugly Verb: And why I've never fucked anyone", Metro, October 1997.
5) William Monahan. "Critical Mess", Bookforum, Summer 2001, p. 52.
6) John Strausbaugh. "Publishing", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 39 (September 30-October 6, 1998), pp. 1, 9.
7) Dave Eggers. "Letters column: Arch Support", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 41 (October 14-20, 1998), p. 3.

Absence alert no more!

I sure have been absent for a while. Sometimes you have to go away to come back. Well, I'm back. I feel like this can be a new beginning for me. I've got a lot to catch up on but also a lot more to say now. I'm going to take one last look at Dave Eggers' so-called 'Fuck' essay and blog about it. I think I need to be a lot less detailed in my posts, wouldn't you say? More to the point. That's going to be my new modus operandi for 2011 and possibly beyond if it proves to be more effective. This is going to be an exciting year at my blog! I'm back!

William Monahan gets chummy with a New York City locksmith for an HBO TV series

Just a few chapters into Joel Kostman's memoir Keys to the City, it was clear to me that his memoir was a giant-assed metaphor about discovering New York City one keyhole at a time. Through his trade as a Professional Locksmith, Mr. Kostman encounters all sorts of characters. Ever since Keys to the City was published back in 1997, there have been enthusiasms about bringing it to the screen. Dennis Duggan reported in his 1997 Newsday article that Mr. Kostman was "at work on a novel" and taking calls "from a talent agency in Hollywood that wants to turn [Keys to the City] into a television series."¹ Well, recently it was announced on Deadline.com that Keys to the City is set to be produced as an HBO TV series with writer-director William Monahan adapting. "Finally!", you heave, but what vexes me is that Keys to the City is really not that dramatic of a work. What Mr. Kostman has done really well in his memoir is to capture what it is like to be a locksmith in New York City, but you'd be hard pressed to get a single episode out of it. That's probably why memoirist-locksmith Joel Kostman has been signed on as a consultant for the show. Mr. Kostman has written his own screenplays, albeit unproduced and probably unsold, so he will be eager to collaborate with Mr. Monahan who, I will note, is about ten years younger than him. Together, these two men have the opportunity—and excuse me for setting some goals for them—to create one of the greatest dramas in modern history.

At that they will surely fail, having long ago passed the age in which one can summon their inner-genius, but the opportunity is there, nonetheless. Mr. Kostman, in a way, has already succeeded merrily with his memoir. There's nothing wrong with it. It's an intriguing little thing, coming in at 136 pages in my edition. He's been writing a sequel to his memoir ever since, in the form of additional stories, and hopefully HBO does some kind of marketing campaign that puts some of his unpublished locksmith-writing onto the web. Assuming Mr. Kostman has continued working as a New York City locksmith all these years, he has now got about 32 years of locksmith-experience to draw upon. And then there is Mr. Monahan, who does not like high concept fare, having been quoted in The Boston Globe, "I generally hate high-concept stuff," who is unlikely to turn Keys to the City into a TV series about a locksmith who goes to work for the mafia, CIA, or other type of exciting organization. We can rejoice in the great probability that every attempt will be made by Mr. Monahan and Mr. Kostman to tell the actual story of a professional New York City locksmith, without much in the way of exaggerations. Jeepers, what fantasticness! Yippee.

I've been wondering in what year the HBO TV series will be set, because locks have changed since the memoir was published in 1997. Having worked as a writer at New York Press during the period 1994-2001, Mr. Monahan knows New York City pretty well, but he may be more comfortable with the New York City of the 1990s, rather than the New York City of today. Details. But it is such details that interest me, such as did a New York Press writer ever review Keys to the City when it was published in the 90s, and which studio executive is it that's been hoarding a secret love for this memoir for the past decade and a bit? Maybe the producer behind the project, John Lesher, should be asked such questions? Mr. Monahan probably read Keys to the City back when it was first published, though. I've imagined Mr. Monahan with a subscription to Publishers Weekly back in the 1990s, scrutinizing every single book that was being published at the time, while trying to get his own novel, Light House: A Trifle, published. His friend Bruno Maddox has said of him, "He's read everything and seems to approach writing as sort of filling in the gaps in the Western canon."  Well, if Mr. Monahan has been hoarding a secret love for Keys to the City all these years, good on him for bringing it to fruition.

So what ever happened to that other TV series whose pilot was reportedly being written by Mr. Monahan for a CBS time slot backed by Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Productions? It was also set in New York City. That would normally be my take-away question, but I'm actually more interested in Mr. Kostman by the end of the writing of this blog entry, so the focus to him!

Take-away question:  Is Joel Kostman still working as a locksmith in New York City?

Sources:

1) Dennis Duggan (1997-11-02) "A Way With Words and Wayward Locks", Newsday.