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.

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.

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.

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.

The early scripts of William Monahan

Since I discussed, a couple of days ago, writer-director William Monahan's mockery of a few scripts by aspiring screenwriters that he had once been asked to read, I thought I would discuss his own work as an aspiring screenwriter in the 1990s. He has said that he wrote his first screenplay at age 12. While I can't speak for this first screenplay of his, I can say a few things about two spec scripts that Mr. Monahan was hawking in the 1990s, as well as the adaptation of his novel Light House: A Trifle that he was commissioned to do. One of these two spec scripts was titled "Tripoli" and lead to a commission for a screenplay about the Crusades that would become his first produced screenplay, the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven.

I will refer to these two spec scripts from the 1990s as "Tripoli" and "The Essex", although it's possible that Mr. Monahan has used many different working titles for these scripts over the years. "Tripoli" is about an American soldier named William Eaton who led a campaign in the 1800s to return the exiled heir Hamet Karamanli to the throne of the Barbary Coast nation of Tripoli. As Mr. Monahan tells it, there are two versions of his "Tripoli" script, which came, respectively, before and after he was inspired by a 1994 TV broadcast of Ridley Scott's The Duellists (Kingdom of Heaven Q&A session, audio recording part 2: 18:35 minute mark):

"Well, Ridley inspired me. Tripoli: I was writing it as a screenplay, and I knew enough of the industry to know that it'd be very hard to get it made and if it was made it wouldn't be made right. This is long before anything. So I turned around and started to write it as a novel. So I was rewriting Tripoli as a novel and I got kind of frustrated because I knew it should be a movie, and I just gave up, got a coffee, went into the other room, flipped on the TV and The Duellists was on, which I hadn't seen since it was in the theaters. And then I thought, "Ahh, yeah, that's how you do it."

So I went back, chucked the pages of the novel away, and redid it as a screenplay. And about seven years later, lightning struck. [Ridley Scott and I] ended up talking at a breakfast table, during a meeting in which I was so nervous I managed to get my corn muffin into my hair, because there I am, and the guy across the table appears in every respect to be Ridley Scott and he's not only said he wants to direct Tripoli, he's asked me if I know anything about knights for another film. So, yeah, my answer is Ridley."

So there's a clear before and after version of his "Tripoli" script, that is, before and after Mr. Monahan's TV viewing of Ridley Scott's The Duellists. In between there was Mr. Monahan's attempted rewrite of the "Tripoli" script as a novel, the results of which can be read in a Massachusetts literary journal called Old Crow Review. You will find Mr. Monahan's adaptation of the "Tripoli" script as a historical fiction piece titled "Romantic" in issue 8 (December 1997) of Old Crow Review with a note at the beginning warning, "William Eaton was real, and nothing so attractive. This is an adaptation of an original screenplay." At the end of this 16-page long historical fiction piece, Mr. Monahan includes the following copyright information: "Copyright 1993, 1997 William Monahan."¹ This indicates that by 1993 he had copyrighted the original "Tripoli" script. No clues on when the second "Tripoli" script was copyrighted. It was reported to have been sold in 2001, but has yet to be produced.

Okay, enough about Mr. Monahan's "Tripoli" script. Anyone following the travails of Mr. Monahan's "Tripoli" script has long ago concluded that it won't be happening as a film at any point in the foreseeable future. Of his early scripts, the one that seems to have the best chance of becoming a film, at the moment, is "The Essex". It has been reported that GK Films' Graham King and Mr. Monahan will be producing "The Essex". "The Essex" is about Captain David S. Porter and his sea battles against the British during the War of 1812. Mr. Monahan has been captivating his readers with glimpses into his "The Essex" script since 1994 (that's misleading, sorry: I couldn't resist the flourish; he only ever mentioned "The Essex" in one essay from 1994 titled "Whale's Jaw"):²

When Captain David Porter, cruising in the South Atlantic during the War of 1812, unexpectedly hooked a right and took the Essex frigate around Cape Horn, he entered history as the captain of the first United States warship to enter the Pacific. There have been many since, so Porter's rounding of the Horn was an important historical matter, and even more important was the fact that, when he got into the Pacific, he smashed the living bejesus out of the English whale fleet, the vessels of which, as armed privateers, had been preying on American vessels who had no knowledge of the war.

...

The British Admiralty freaked and sent a special squadron to cruise for the Essex—the Bismarck of her day—and Porter, in a tired ship that could not possibly fight its way back to the Atlantic, did his third remarkable and historical thing. Apprised of the squadron, he made sail for the Marquesas, to hide from the British and refit his ship. While he was ashore on Nuku Hiva, he not only fought a bloody high-cinema war with the warlike Typees, he annexed the island, and committed the first act of extraterritorial American imperialism. Don't even think of writing the screenplay. I've got it registered.

So, obviously, early 19th century naval history is one of Mr. Monahan's pet subjects. Let's hope "The Essex" doesn't go the way of "Tripoli". We need more early 19th century naval battles to titillate us on the big screen.

On top of having written these two spec scripts in the 1990s, Mr. Monahan had at least a few experiences with the film industry prior to his big break with Ridley Scott in 2001. There was script coverage he was supposed to do for a film company, which I have blogged about previously, and then there was also a screenplay that he mentions that he had been expected to deliver, and hadn't, in a 1994 New York Press essay titled "The Agony & the Excrement":³

"I can't work. I've been vaguely trying to finish this screenplay I was supposed to deliver last March or six years ago or something. I don't like it anymore and nobody understands me anyway."

What is this screenplay, you ask? I don't know. It may have been a rewrite of one of the scripts that he was supposed to do script coverage of, considering the film company apparently gave him the option of rewriting these scripts and earning industry scale (see this blog entry). Or maybe this screenplay that he was supposed to deliver was one of his two spec scripts, "Tripoli" or "The Essex". Or maybe it was an entirely different screenplay. I don't know. Really, I don't. It's just interesting and related to the subject of this blog entry. You think I'm wasting your time with trivia, don't you? So what, it's my blog and you're still reading for some reason.

Eventually things started to come together for Mr. Monahan. In 1998, Variety reported that Mr. Monahan had been hired to write a screen adaptation of his novel Light House: A Trifle. Interestingly, at the time of the reporting, his novel was on submission to publishers. Only after he was hired to adapt his novel, did the novel sell to Riverhead Books. In the following year, a little cocky and probably buzzed by his recent successes, he had this to say about the film industry and writing:⁴

"What do you do? I don't fucking know. You wouldn't know if I told you. Some stuff. You don't want to say I'm a novelist before your novel is out. You certainly don't want to say you're a screenwriter, because then you're off into a gauntlet of naive civilian questions you can't answer, because nothing's real about the film business except the money. No one lets you off the hook when you're a writer of any sort: Everyone thinks they might like to have a crack at it themselves. And you can't say It's as hard to do what I do as to be a master cathedral architect, you shithead, no you can't have my agent's number, no you can't pitch anything to the newspaper, and furthermore in the sacred name of humanity shut up about your poetry about your ex-wife."

The "put-down" is Mr. Monahan's forte. He will summon hypothetical persons and then proceed to tear them a new one.

What followed after the sale of his novel Light House: A Trifle to Riverhead Books seems to have been agony for Mr. Monahan. He has said in a Collider.com interview that he "really hated the experience of publishing a novel". In the same interview, he also said that "The only positive benefit from publishing 'Light House' was that [he] got hired to write the screenplay and then shifted [his] attention to screenwriting exclusively." Light House: A Trifle has yet to be made into a film.

Since his career in the film industry took off in 2001 with the sale of his "Tripoli" script, he's been working pretty steadily as a screenwriter and, most recently, as a director. I feel like I should offer him congratulations at this point, but instead I'll conclude with an unattributed quote on the subject of originality that I'm going to try to attribute to Mr. Monahan (a known Simpsons fan). The unattributed quote is cited by a former NYPress colleague and friend of Mr. Monahan's named Jim Knipfel who writes a column called "Slackjaw":

I’ve since learned over and over again that any claims of “originality” should be considered with more than a little suspicion.

Maybe a friend of mine had the proper attitude. A while back he sent me a copy of a screenplay he’d written. It was a good screenplay, I thought, but the final scene seemed awfully similar to something I’d seen on The Simpsons several years back.

When I mentioned this to him, he shrugged it off. “There’s nothing new anymore,” he said. “I gave up that notion a long time ago . . . and besides, how many people apart from you do you think will even notice, or care?”

I'm pretty sure Mr. Knipfel is citing his friend Mr. Monahan. It's just a guess, but I believe a rather good one. Rather good one. I'm not British, but those rathers slip in fairly easy, don't they? At any rate, I rather like this take on originality. It just really feels to me like it comes from the mind of William Monahan.

Take-away question: What were Mr. Monahan's experiences in the film industry in the 1990s?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Romantic", Old Crow Review, no. 8, FkB Press, December 1997, 16 pages.

2) William Monahan. "Whale's Jaw: Thar They Blow", New York Press, vol. 7, no. 45 (November 9–15, 1994), pp. 1, 18, 20–21.

3) William Monahan. "The Agony & the Excrement: A Scary Home Companion", New York Press, vol. 7, no. 39 (September 28–October 4, 1994), p. 14.

4) William Monahan.  "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub", New York Press, vol. 12, no. 27 (July 7–13, 1999), pp. 1, 18.

An Evening In Which William Monahan Tried Doing Script Coverage

Writer-director William Monahan tried doing script coverage? Apparently. Doesn't sound like the gig lasted long though. From his own account, maybe an evening. Doing script coverage ranks high up there among the most agonizing summer jobs he has had, in my opinion, second to his time as editor of Hamptons magazine.¹ While his position as editor of Hamptons magazine lasted several issues, his time doing script coverage, as he tells it in his New York Press essay "Driving the Miasma," seems to have lasted no more than one evening:²

I was out of school. A woman I knew started working for a film company and got me a gig where I was supposed to review and rewrite scripts. I thought I might make some money or ordinary reputation—the sensation was like being on the verge of suicide—and got a cottage off by myself in Massachusetts for that summer.

My landlady liked the Miasma. The cottage was a small, raftered place—mismatched cups and spoons, a kitchen table with yellow oilcloth on it—and I settled in to be by myself and get serious. About the third day the FedEx guy came, mentioned that he liked the Miasma. He left off a parcel of screenplays with yellow stick-ums plastered all over them and memos paperclipped to the logoed title cards. I sat on the couch, flipped open script one. The first lines went like this:

FADE UP ON:

A PAIR OF EYES. They are blue eyes, with crow's feet at the corners. Something tells you that these eyes have seen a lot. The man who owns these eyes is a man to be reckoned with.

PULL BACK TO REVEAL:

"SKIP" BURTON.

I'm dead serious. I read the script dutifully. It was about someone going to the Midwest to get revenge on a pack of townies. No one spoke English. It was based on other films and television shows. I opened another one, and it was worse. By the end of the evening there was a pile of smashed screenplays against the wall. One of them had contained the line, "The car he drives says a lot about him."

Each one of those screenplays was worth $600 to me if I merely wrote a two-page analysis. If I rewrote any of them, I'd get scale, which isn't bad. I burned the fucking things in the stove, and went out for a walk.

This evening spent smashing screenplays against the wall probably took place sometime in the early 1990s or late 1980s. I've heard of how exasperated script readers in Hollywood can get, but this is ridiculous. I wonder who these aspiring screenwriters were? To whom does the "SKIP" BURTON character belong? That's not my take-away question for this blog entry, though.

Take-away question: Which film company was it that William Monahan was supposed to review and rewrite scripts for?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at 'Hamptons'", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 29 (July 17–23, 1996), pp. 1, 28–29.
2) William Monahan. "Driving the Miasma: A Generational Automotive Report", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 5 (February 1–7, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.

The Gallery magazine articles by Alan Cabal

Although periodical writer Alan Cabal is best known as a New York Press writer, he has written for other publications like High Times and CounterPunch. Then there is Gallery magazine. He wrote two articles for the publication back in 2000. When I mentioned to Mr. Cabal that I had read his Gallery magazine articles, his response was: "It might amuse you to know that they tried to stiff me on the money for that. Of course I got it, but the inherent absurdity of trying to stiff a guy on an article about the collections business resonates with the times, no?" Gallery magazine went bankrupt in 2008, according to Wikipedia. Also, according to Wikipedia, they left "many photographers and models empty handed; some were owed as much as $100,000."

Of Mr. Cabal's two articles for Gallery, one was about his three years in the collections industry and the other was about the Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach. In "When A Stranger Calls" he gives a personal account of the collections industry followed by advice on how to protect yourself from a collector; and in "They Might Be Nazis?" he gives a short history of the music group Laibach's origins. You can read them both below.

Here are scans of page 46-50 of his Gallery article "When A Stranger Calls: The Ins And Outs Of The Collection Trade"  from the April 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal; the illustrations are by Tony Millionaire):

Page 46:

Page 47:

Page 48:

Page 49:

Page 50:

And here is a scan of page 143 of Mr. Cabal's Gallery article "They Might Be Nazis?" from the March 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal):

Although Gallery's management were apparently assholes who often wouldn't, or couldn't, pay their employees, the end result seems to have been a decent magazine, with softcore nudity that you can share with your girlfriend to her enjoyment too. You might even be able to get her to recreate some of the photography for you. I did.

First known interview with Alan Cabal materializes on the web!

Alan Cabal, February 2010

Jeepers, blogger Mesikämmen has posted an excellent interview with Alan Cabal! It's funny and unpredictable, and as far as I know, the first known interview with Alan Cabal, ever. Here's a sampling of some of the exchanges between Mesikämmen and Alan Cabal:

Q: Who are the most dangerous men on Earth? Why?

A: Darth Cheney has no pulse. Do the math. Does the name “George Romero” ring a bell anywhere? HE’S A GODDAMNED ZOMBIE, they are fucking RARE now, but the fucking things will be galloping over YOUR GODDAMNED WELL-MANICURED EUROPEAN HEDGES shrieking about their RIGHTS to bite into your BRAINS and SPINAL CORDS turning you into their feces or worse.

...

Q: What makes you American? I feel you are in your own peculiar way very American – what is the essence of your American soul?

A: I was born here. I could not possibly be anything but an American. I have no discernible or traceable biological origin. It is sealed.

Alan Cabal, February 2010

For your benefit, I will elucidate upon why, I think, Mr. Cabal's biological origin is "sealed": his biological mother was seriously troubled, and so Mr. Cabal ended up in the hands of an adoption agency that probably seals their records from the prying eyes of their clients' progeny.¹ He probably has little idea about who she was, and even less idea about who his father was. Mr. Cabal  has written that his biological mother claimed to have been raped and that the adoption agency had declared her "borderline psychotic." Here's the rundown about his biological mother from his NYPress essay about his adoptive mother:¹

I was born on Dec. 1, 1953, to a weird little girl from Bridgeton named Helene who was 15 years old. Her mother was a certified schoolteacher who for some reason was working as a bus dispatcher at the time. Her mother has been described to me as "abrasive and domineering." Helene played the piano and had an interest in mathematics. She had a tendency to break out in hives when she got nervous, which was fairly often by most accounts. She had been raped, or so she said. Spring fever, perhaps. The adoption agency’s psychiatrist declared her "borderline psychotic," but psychiatry is at best an inexact science, kind of like voodoo or dowsing. They bury their mistakes, like the rest of the medical profession.

Mr. Cabal's mention of Operation Paperclip in the interview piqued my curiosity, and maybe it did the same for you, too? If you want to read more about some of the ideas that Mr. Cabal has, then check out his extensive bibliography which I put together in my spare time in my capacity as a NYPress scholar.

Take-away question: Why is Mr. Cabal's biological origin sealed?


Sources:

1) "Badlands: Burying Camden And My Mom", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 6 (February 9–15, 2000).

William Monahan once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night

As I wrote a few days ago, I'm apparently a big bother to writer and filmmaker William Monahan. Perhaps it's the far reach of my research into his works, which has brought me into contact with his friends, brief acquaintances, and even former colleagues. Or maybe it's the genealogical research I've been doing into his family tree. What writer wants someone poring through official documents left behind by the members of their family for the purposes of elucidating upon their written works.

You may have noticed that so far I have exclusively discussed writer William Monahan and his works in my blog entries without any mention of other New York Press writers, other than briefly mentioning C.J. Sullivan the other day. This is just the current kick I'm on. Before I started this blog I had just finished writing a biography of NYPress writer Alan Cabal. I've done some research into NYPress writer Jim Knipfel, but other than his memoirs and some of his journalism, I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Knipfel's works. I think Mr. Knipfel is a great character though, but on the whole he's a hack (he admitted as much in an interview, if I recollect properly).

As troubling as it may be to have someone examining your life's work with a magnifying glass, at least my efforts are not inane. As Mr. Monahan tells it, he and his friends once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night and did nothing more than ask one silly question after rousing him from bed. Here is the conversation that Mr. Monahan claims to have had, circa 1992, with writer Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993):

Excerpted from Mr. Monahan's NYPress essay "Byrne"¹:

One night back in my party days we drank several bottles of Jagermeister, had a talk about the state of literature and decided to call writers. Someone who had just read John Cheever's letters tried to call Allan Gurganus' mother and ask how she thought he'd got into The New Yorker. We tried Julian Barnes. Amis was unlisted. Gore Vidal came to naught—you try to get a phone number in Italy at 3 a.m.

Finally it occurred to us: Anthony Burgess. If anyone would talk to us—if there was anyone we wanted to talk to—it was Anthony Burgess.

He having published his addresses in his autobiography (either Little Wilson and Big God or the other one), we figured he wanted company and wouldn't mind a call. I got directory information in the Principality of Monaco (you have to call France for this) and asked for the number for Mr. John Wilson. The phone purred about 4000 times and then an old Englishman answered.

"Who in God's name is it?"

"Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes?"

"The writer Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

I braced myself and got to the clever part.

"Is your pen name John Wilson?"

At this moment, of course, I realized that I'd totally fucked up what I had intended to say. Burgess himself was floored by the inanity of the question. Three thousand miles of weirdness crackled on the line. Burgess recovered first.

"No," he said, smoothly, "I have nothing to do with him." There was another protracted silence. "Go to bed," said Burgess, not unkindly, and hung up.

About a year later, he died. From then till now I have never bothered another writer, and so it shall be, selah. All that's left is karma.

Anthony Burgess was the pen name of John Burgess Wilson, though every reader knows the man by his pen name rather than his real name. When I read Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange a few years back I loved it and even took to using, for a short time, and only with my close friends, the fictional argot called Nadsat that the characters in the novel talk to each other in. If Mr. Monahan's anecdote above is any indication, Anthony Burgess seems to have been a kind, gentle man, though I don't know what his temper was with journalists, interviewers, and his biographers. Everyone has their snapping point.

Take-away question: Who were Mr. Monahan's drinking buddies on the night they called up writer Anthony Burgess?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Byrne", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 32 (August 6–12, 1997), Books & Publishing Supplement, p. 14.

The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan

While imagining, as a thought experiment, what could be contained in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan," I realized that I could be in it. I've had my share of correspondences with filmmaker William Monahan. At first probing with various fake email accounts, Mr. Monahan eventually began using an @mac.com email address ("wjmonahan@mac.com") to size me up. Ours has been a savage correspondence, with Mr. Monahan acting as a ruthless mentor through edit summaries on the English Wikipedia and as a paranoid celebrity through various email accounts. Originally, I antagonized Mr. Monahan by simply being a terrible writer who was working on his Wikipedia article. He'd correct my writing on Wiki. After he got a hold of my email address, silliness took over. Through perseverance I like to think that I've progressed from someone who had below average reading comprehension into a mediocre scholar. Certainly Mr. Monahan had legitimate issues to raise about some of my bad writing on the English Wikipedia. These days, I do my work at Squidoo.

I'm fascinated by the subject of collecting emails from authors. Are such collections of emails going to become the new Collected Letters? Any kind of electronic correspondence could possibly be collected. Facebook and Twitter are currently big with celebrities. The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be archiving all tweets, by everyone. Twitter is easy, since the information is public, but emails are private.

Although all these electronic correspondences need to be saved, it's hard to say exactly how the next generation of scholars will get a hold of all these Important Emails. An extreme method would be to hire your hackers Joe Wardriver, Sue Cracker, or Thomas Nation to break into the email accounts of authors for the purposes of dumping the lot onto the web. There have been instances when excerpts of Mr. Monahan's emails have been published, but this can hardly be relied upon. NYPress founder and former publisher Russ Smith has excerpted, in his Mugger column, some of his correspondences with Mr. Monahan regarding the possibility of a Hillary Clinton assignment. I believe, however, that a more practical method of acquiring Important Emails might be email donations from persons who have had lengthy exchanges with authors like Mr. Monahan. I, myself, happen to have been blessed with several emails from Mr. Monahan, from his MobileMe account, as well as from his various fake email accounts. To give this idea of making donations of Important Emails Exchanged With Authors some weight, I've decided to release a few of the more interesting emails that Mr. Monahan and I have exchanged.

Before I do that, however, I would just like to emphasize the importance of Mr. Monahan's electronic correspondences. In prose, Mr. Monahan is incredibly informative. His densely packed sentences are of equally high quality in both his journalism and his interviews. Mr. Monahan doesn't do conventional interviews, as Juan Morales wrote in his Los Angeles Times article. It seems his preferred format is the email interview and for good reason. Compare his recent Screen Daily interview with the 2008 video interview conducted by Evelyn Vaccaro below:




There's a stark difference in the quality of these two interviews, though both are equally informative. In the Screen Daily interview he's eloquent, but in the video interview above he comes off as a blubbering fool constantly wondering if, you know, we, you know, know what he's talking about. It's unlikely that Mr. Monahan will be submitting himself to much more of that. So when it comes to Mr. Monahan, we scholars will find the most interesting insights in his emails, forum posts, and so on.

There may be a wealth of forum posts out there by Mr. Monahan, somewhere in the deep Web. Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott remembers Mr. Monahan participating in discussions on an Internet chat board, which might have been Echo BBS since that's where TV critic Aaron Barnhart encountered Mr. Monahan in those days. I haven't yet probed the archives of Echo BBS. You have to register. There's research to be done there.

But to get back to the subject of Important Emails, it was on August 7th, 2009 that Mr. Monahan decided to switch from using various fake email accounts for his correspondences with me to using an @mac.com email address with his real name: "wjmonahan@mac.com". What is telling is that by 2009, you could no longer get yourself an @mac.com email address. The .Mac service was re-branded as MobileMe in 2008, so from then on Apple was handing out @me.com email addresses. It is highly unlikely that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address was created a year in advance for future use as a fake email account.

At any rate, it was a Friday night when I received my first email from Mr. Monahan's @mac.com email address. According to the email header of this first email, Mr. Monahan was in the City of London. He had been filming London Boulevard. It was a Saturday morning for him.

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp014.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:20:42 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

You're fucked. Have a nice day.

END OF EMAIL

My response was immediate:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 20:56:56 -0700 (PDT)

Sir, you have dreamed of having an antagonist like myself. Light House: A Trifle, Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, and even that BlackBook Magazine interview you did with Mr. Thewlis, indicate a deep obsession with the kind of character I have been.

How much do you know about me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was equally immediate:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])

 by asmtp011.mac.com

From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:36:24 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

I know most recently, Moriarty, that you're the kind of fool who responds to a showdown by instantly cutting his own throat legally with a single English sentence. You're all done, William.

END OF EMAIL

My response was:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:42:51 -0700 (PDT)

You mean your email from an hour ago was the beginning of a showdown?

What could I have won if the "showdown" had gone better for me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp019.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:47:00 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

No, it was the end of one. You crapped it at first fire and admitted that you were an insane stalker, you retard.

END OF EMAIL

Yet, off-and-on we went for months. I tried to steer the conversations toward questions I had about his works, but I was never even remotely successful. We simply had a very weird back-and-forth, which maybe said everything. For the record, I consider myself to be a Monahan scholar rather than his "insane stalker." The character that I had mentioned having been was that of an amateur desperately seeking recognition, an appreciative clapping sound for my efforts. 

At some point, Mr. Monahan decided to try to convince me that he actually wasn't "William Monahan," but I am someone who can penetrate background, so while he was trying to convince me that he actually wasn't who he had presented himself as, he gave himself away, ironically, using a single English sentence:

Received: from [10.103.27.56] (166-205-007-042.mobile.mymmode.com [166.205.7.42])
by asmtp011.mac.com
From: William Monahan
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Build now
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:25:42 -0700
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7C144)

Hey, Maggot, what's shaking. It's probably past time to tell you that im not William Monahan, so whatever rocks you're getting off with the doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit, sorry. 

END OF EMAIL

In that last English sentence he uses the idiom "get your rocks off" and the term "autodidact", all the while using a persona that reminded me of some sort of "Rock 'n Roll" guy. Your clues are "get your rocks off" and "autodidact". Back in 1997, when he and NYPress colleague C.J. Sullivan had a tiff in the letters column of NYPress, he made a similar remark to C.J. Sullivan.¹ It's a long letter, which I only excerpt below, but worth reading in its entirety, particularly if you're doing criticism of The Departed:

Boston or the boroughs, I know Sullivan like a species of bird: a shamrocks-and-vomit shovel leaner of the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected." These guys like to hang out with cops and ward bosses and so forth. They tend to use phrases like "fallen fireman" without irony; they start to sound like Barry Fitzgerald when they get drunk; and they like to hang around bars getting off on how superior they are to guys who actually do anything or, say, go home and fuck their wives. You know what had me on the floor about Sullivan's letter? When he mentioned knowing the cop.

So while C.J. Sullivan is the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected," I am apparently the type who gets his rocks off with my "doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit." I would have described myself as the type who gets his rocks off by doing literary biography, piecemeal, all the while chronicling my efforts in my blog. As for the term "autodidact", it shows up, in comedic form, in his novel Light House: A Trifle, but more so, it's one of the main themes of his journalism.

It's ironic that while attempting to deny who he was to his unofficial biographer (me), he in fact gave himself away. But then again, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mr. Monahan's works, and if anyone was going to pick up on these clues it was going to be me.

After the @mac.com email address ceased to be responsive, other fake email accounts continued our correspondence, with one lady named "Manda Trothero" writing to inform me that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address had been previously used by an assistant in her office:

You recently wrote to a defunct email previously used by an assistant in this office. William Monahan does not use email. However, he does answer questions! If you would like to ask questions, please direct them to this address. If you are a journalist please identify the publication for which you work. If you are a scholar, please identify the institution at which you study or teach. Thank you! 

Our conversations abound with silliness. Mr. Monahan is a writer who writes weird characters, such as Claude La Badarian. If I've become a part of Mr. Monahan's creative process, so be it. I enjoy our emails.

As the fictional character Claude La Badarian said of Mr. Monahan:

An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan's Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did--all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast--after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various "hotmail" addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)--I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print.

The part above about Mr. Monahan being "rather various, personality-wise" has been my experience, too. In the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian mentions how the fictional William Monahan's Mindspring account had apparently once been password-hacked, throwing all suspicion on Claude La Badarian, of course; but this is fiction, fiction set in 2001. In the year 2010, I know of only one person who still has a Mindspring account and uses it regularly for email; other than that, it's a relic. The fictional character Claude La Badarian had a Mindspring email address too: LaBadarian@mindspring.com. If Mr. Monahan truly had a Mindspring account in real life, I hope we will one day get to read the email correspondences that took place in his Mindspring account, perhaps in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan"?

Take-away question: Is there anyone else out there willing to make donations to the web of their email correspondences with William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan responds to C.J. Sullivan's letter "The Troubles" to the paper, in his own letter "They're a Touchy People, And Like to Fight", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 4 (January 22–28, 1997), p. 46. Note: Both William Monahan and C.J. Sullivan were NYPress writers at the time.