Tag: The Dreyfus Affair

Angel

LSU! LSU! LSU! LSU!

The Lady Tigers dominated Iowa yesterday to the point of it being embarrassing. They scored over a hundred points–a first for a NCAA women’s title game–and won LSU’s first national title in an NCAA championship tournament in program history.

PAUL: When LSU wins it’s going to bring all the racists out because Iowa is all white and LSU is all Black.

He wasn’t wrong. All the racists who watched to see the white girls win were out in force on Twitter, and like all racists, the hypocrisy and idiocy was strong. Then again, you have to be both hypocritical and idiotic to be a racist in the first place.

And later that evening, LSU Gymnastics qualified (thanks to a tie-breaker) for Nationals as well. All in all, it was a good day for women’s athletics down here in bayou country.

LSU! LSU! LSU! LSU! So proud of our young women!

Well, I finished the revision yesterday. I just need to go over it one last time to make sure there are no screaming, glaring errors (like a chapter missing, that sort of thing) and will send it off today. I am rather pleased with it; it wasn’t nearly the enormous mess that I thought it was originally, and it didn’t need nearly as much work as I had originally feared. One of the primary problems with being older and having had COVID-related memory issues as a writer is I can’t remember sometimes what I’ve already written. As someone who has a very bad habit of writing the same scene twice at different spaces in the book, or sometimes will make a change to the story in the middle of a later chapter that needs correcting or being set up earlier in the book…yes, it’s a serious problem for me. But its done, finished and completed and now I can move on to fixing the mess that is the Scotty book, Mississippi River Mischief, which might not be as easy as this one was–the problem with it is systemic and runs through the entire book, from beginning to end–but I am getting there. Hopefully by the end of April it will be completed and I can move on from both of these, other than copy edits and proofing.

It feels like I’ve been working on these two manuscripts forever.

I also went down a bit of a rabbit hole I’ve visited before on the web; Princess Alice of Monaco, the first American-born Monegasque princess and was from New Orleans: Alice Heine. She fascinates me, and it’s amazing how little she is known in the United States, let alone New Orleans. There are no biographies of her and her colorful life, which included an early marriage to the Duc deRichelieu and a second marriage to the prince of Monaco. She built the Monte Carlo opera house and I believe she also founded the Monegasque ballet as well. She and the prince were unhappy, and she left him, moving to Paris where she was a patroness of the arts, was known for her fabulous salons, and took lots of lovers. The only book I found by looking her up was Anne Edwards’ The Grimaldis of Monaco, and it’s really a history of the 800 year old royal family. I bought the ebook of it, and look forward to reading about Princess Alice. Were I a biographer and/or a historian, I would probably do a biography of her. She fascinates me. For a little while I even thought she’d make an interesting heroine for a period series about an amateur sleuth; the Princess of Monaco as an amateur sleuth in Paris around the turn of the century? The Dreyfus affair? The trial of Oscar Wilde, whom I am sure was a friend of hers?

I also finished reading Robert Caro’s immense opus The Power Broker this weekend. It was a fascinating study of Robert Moses, an incredibly driven and smart man who rose to great power without ever being elected–by building highways, bridges and parks, not just in New York City but the entire state. I did note something during the course of the 1100+ pages; something I’d also noticed with in-depth biographies of Lyndon Johnson (also Caro) and Huey Long: these men were all forward-thinking and progressive, and tried to effect change only to be thwarted by those in power…so the three men out-thunk their enemies, outplayed them, and amassed enormous power in order to get the things they wanted accomplished. They fought dirty, certainly weren’t opposed to corruption in order to get what they needed/wanted, but eventually…as in every case, overplayed their hands. Johnson left office a tattered old man with his reputation in ruins; Moses lost all his power and control; and Long of course was murdered. My next non-fiction read will be David McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood, methinks.

I’m a bit sleepy and groggy this morning; I didn’t sleep great or deeply last night but it was restful physically; more of a mental thing, really; it felt like my mind never really went into the sleep mode. But that’s fine. I have a mentally challenging day at the office ahead of me today, so hopefully sleep will come tonight. We also watched a couple more episodes of The Night Agent, which is getting better and more interesting. Hong Chau is fantastic in it (as she is in everything) and the male lead is certainly good-looking and hot enough to make up for his wooden delivery of his lines–but it actually works for his character, who is supposed to be an unemotional do-your-job kind of guy; though there are times when it’s just cringy.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will be back in the morning.

Perfect Way

I submitted a story to Cemetery Dance yesterday, and felt very accomplished after having done so. As I have said before, getting a story published in Cemetery Dance is a bucket list item for me, and I am reasonably proud of the story; we’ll see what happens. But I’m glad I did it; glad I spent the morning and early afternoon revising and polishing it. And hopefully,  if they don’t use the story I’ll get a chance to submit to them again at some point.

To celebrate, I went to the gym and did cardio, continuing my iPad screening of Troy: Fall of a City–which is starting to, sadly get a little boring. I’ll keep watching, though–I want to see how they play the story out, plus it’s helping me with my pronunciation of all their names; most of which I’ve been saying wrong my entire life, since I was a kid and read The Windy Walls of Troy.

I also spent some time last night with my journals; basically going through them and marking the pages where I wrote notes on the Scotty book, which should make the next revision much easier. Huzzah! I am also glad that I did this because not only did I find some ideas for short stories I’d forgotten, as well as how some of the short stories I have written since the first of the year were born, but I also discovered that I had roughly sketched out a couple of scenes for Bury Me in Satin, which I typed up last night–remember, I’d started writing the opening on the 4th, but was incredibly pleased to see that I’d actually handwritten not only the opening but some other scenes from the first and second chapter that needed to be transcribed. So, I am pretty far ahead on this one already, which is kind of awesome. I’m having lunch today with a friend, which will be lovely, and then I am going to run a couple of errands before coming home and doing some more writing.

I may even (gasp) return to the gym for the third consecutive day: madness.

I also spent part of the day reading about the Dreyfus Affair in Barbara Tuchman’s book The Proud Tower, which takes a look at life and the issues confronting the great powers from 1895-1914; basically, the set-up for World War I. I’d heard of the Dreyfus Affair, of course, and Emile Zola’s participation; but I didn’t know the entire story, and, well, you really can’t go wrong with reading Barbara Tuchman on a subject you want to know about.  I love reading history, and I always make a point of trying to read some around the 4th of July (I also took down Catherine Drinker Bowen’s history of the Constitutional Convention Miracle at Philadelphia, which should be required reading for all Americans); Tuchman is the kind of historian I would have liked to have been, writing the kinds of things I would have liked to have written had my career path gone in that direction (I still toy with The Monstrous Regiment of Women, a history of the sixteenth century, built around all the women who held power–more women held power in that century than any before or since). The Dreyfus Affair was really something, and even more horrific, in many ways that time in France is reflected in modern day American society as well.

The next story in Promises in Every Star and Other Stories is “The Porn King and I”:

He is beautiful.

He is everything I want in a lover.

Thick curly black hair.

Blue eyes.

Muscles rippling under tan skin.

A hard, round, beautiful ass.

The cock of Apollo.

I first saw him in a poster in the adult book store on Decatur Street. The poster was black with just a picture of him, hands on hips, wearing a jock strap. His face was smiling, a warm, inviting smile that would melt anyone’s heart and stir their groin. His tanned skin gleamed. At the bottom of the poster in red capital letters it said: CODY DALLAS IN THE SEX SENSE. I stood, staring for a few moments, my glance going from that pretty face down the neck to the beautifully shaped chest, smooth and silky, down the abs that looked carved out of stone, to the top of the jock. His hard-on was unmistakable beneath the white cloth. I walked over to the counter. “Do you have that film?” I pointed back over my shoulder with my thumb.

The counter boy was just that; a boy. He didn’t look old enough to be working in a sex shop. Hell, he didn’t look old enough to have hair on his balls. Bleached blonde hair standing up spikily over black roots. A straggle of hair on his chin that was supposed to be a goatee. He weighed maybe 130 pounds. His baggy jeans hung off his hips. A black Marilyn Manson t-shirt. Pierced nose and eyebrow. Tattoos on both arms. He grinned at me. Braces.

“Yeah. Only $59.95 or did you want to rent?”

“I’ll buy.”

I walked home to my apartment on Chartres Street. Opened the door. Switched on the television with the remote. Opened the box and popped the video in. Hit play as I pull off my shirt, kick off shoes, strip naked. Reach underneath the couch for the fresh bottle of poppers and the lube. Fast forward through the opening credits. First scene.

It’s him. He is wearing Daisy Dukes and work boots. No shirt. The sun glistens on the muscles in his back. He is trimming a bush with garden clippers. Every movement he makes causes muscles to ripple. Someone is watching from the house. Behind the curtains a face appears. Cut away to from behind the curtains. He looks beautiful, oh so beautiful. Camera pulls back. The man at the window is naked. Thinner. Not as muscled as Cody. Lean wiry muscle.

Cody looks up at the window and smiles. The man in the window beckons. Cody puts the clippers down and walks to the door. It opens.

I open the bottle of poppers. My eyes are glued to the screen. I lift it up to my right nostril. I close off the left and start inhaling. Deeply. The scent fills my nose, my sinuses, my lungs. I shift it to the other nostril. Inhale.

“The Porn King and I” was, ironically, inspired by something that actually happened; I was walking into the Quarter on a warm early summer evening. I walked past a house right on the sidewalk with its enormous windows open–anyone could have climbed into the house; something that has always amazed me about the Quarter and those that live there–and on the wall was a framed and mounted poster of a porn star (I do not recall, all these years later, precisely which porn star it was; I am thinking Kris Lord but that might be wrong). It inspired a story about a lonely man who talks to the poster, like it’s real, and eventually there’s a scene where a young man catches him talking to the poster, climbs in through the window, and they have nasty hot passionate sex. When I was asked to write this story for one of the Best Gay Erotica volumes, I stripped out the poster and the guy walking by on the street, leaving the main character’s obsession with a porn star, and renting the video from Tower Videos on Decatur Street (which is, sadly, no longer there); the sex scene thus became three-sided: there’s the main character watching the video and masturbating; what he’s imagining in his head as he masturbates; and, of course, what is actually happening on the television screen. I thought it was a clever take.

And the stuff I stripped out? I eventually used in a story about a lonely guy who lives in the Quarter and how a gorgeous young man talks to him through the window, and what transpires then. The story was called “Mr. Lonely” and was published in the original Saints and Sinners anthology.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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