From: nsn@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Nicholas)
Subject: Re: More total blatant fluff
Keywords: long,angsty,nonfluffy
Organization: Electronic and Electrical Engineering - University of Melbourne 
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 06:45:44 GMT

mlloyd@ocf.berkeley.edu (M. Lloyd) writes:
>Seems an appropriate thread to return to.  
Oh, I don't know, Micchelino. You *are* too kind though...

>a Two Nice Girls CD found in a local lesbian bookstore.  
*Everyone* I know (OK, three people :) seems taken with the Two Nice Girls.
Next time I'm queer (in, oh, say a month :) , I'll definitely have to go
to my uni record shop...

>what have we to elicit a response?  Ah yes - Nick :-)
And not just any Nick, but the new and improved, megafluff dotty-queer Nick, 
who, what with Christmas and too good a time spent with his parents and 
dancing with het Greek girls who don't even know what queer means, is on 
leave, and miserable, tired, cowardly Nick has taken his place for the
time being. Like I said, give it another month...

(Do not misunderstand: it's not like queer-Nick is oppressed in a sickly
het Xmas environment he wants out of. He's het-Nick how (although the
occasional pang of seeing others' homophobia still reminds him of his
place), and he's feeling *right* at home. But he's learnt too much this
year to be *smugly* at home...)

>nsn@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Nicholas) writes:
>>Micchelino (Mike Lloyd, if you insist):
>Well, I'm not going to insist either way.  
Good... because I like the endearment in 'Micchelino'. Too often I've let
my responses to your statements of creed be the externalisation of the
conflict going on within me (you know; dotty Nick; misery Nick; authoritarian
Nick); and... it doesn't mean I don't like you, for Chrissakes!

*hesitant (as usual) hug*

>I wasn't intending to defend monomonogamophobia in any
>coherent fashion.  Put another way .. yeah, Nick, I agree with you ..
><hark; is that a rending of the universes I hear?> Being trad is A-OK.

Oh. *sigh* I almost cried when I read this. It was so long since the
debate arose, and... suffice it to say that the battle you'd lost interest
in, Joe continued with me that day in the shoe-store; and yes, there
were other issues lurking around there as well, but... it *was* painful.

It can be said tradism is not OK at all. It can be said that, in not making
an explicit break in *all* matters with the amorphous entity of conservatism
which wreaks so much havoc and misery, I am part of the problem, and when
you don your apparel militant, I am your enemy as much as any other. The
case could be argued, and convinvingly so (as can many another; you pick
the axioms you want).

I don't want any more excuses to hate myself, of course. I am that which
I am. I am a conservative by temperament. I find myself bi, at least
intellectually (OK, some phallolatry and admiration of torsos too, but
I'm not convinced that's enough, especially when bi-hood is defined, as
it has been here, in terms of emotional involvment, and I'm still seeing
myself getting close virtually always to women --- and unlike Orc, I
don't intend to fret it, because if that's who I am, then welcome be it,
though maybe I do have the power to change it --- I need incentive though).
In doing so, I find myself questioning what I'd defaulted with (not
that that had started this year) --- and it hurts, and I'm kicking and
screaming, and sometimes I swim across, and sometimes, like apparently
the last couple of weeks, I turn right back to the familiar banks. I am
weak, after all. I am that that I am now.

Mike says in a more recent posting that you don't have to be a cultural
rebel to be bi, and quotes me as a 'delightfully dotty' example. You're
too kind, Mike. The truth is, though, that I find myself, if not rebelling,
at the least questioning. And it hurts. And you're as arch a rebel as I
know (which just shows how narrow my circle of socialising is). And so
while Iseult makes me squirm more visibly, you gnaw at me.

But Micchelino, you have come to believe what you have. And I'd never
ask of you to moderate the intensity of your beliefs, nor defer in
articulating them. Nor, in fact, do I realistically expect you to :)
As for me... well, that *rime royal* I wrote for Joe and Kar (and have
yet to show them) in October still rings true:

And having travelled down so long a road,
you would have thought I'd learnt a thing or three;
and having borne so long this outcasts' load,
you would have thought I'd know you kin to me,
same-bearers. I who, who still rebel and flee;
I, who have died, and yet to be reborn ---
you'd think I'd know by now. (What knows a pawn?)

You'd think I'd know by now you are my kin,
that I would draw from your rebellion strength,
instead of waxing fearful in the din
prejudiced daemons blabber out at length.
Of what I --- what *they* knew, rests but a tenth.
As for the rest... I doubt, like you have doubted ---
reluctant though, bewildered, weak, and routed.

(And I, this mannikin so lost and voiceless,
make suit to gain your love? etc.)... but that's another story.

>But Nick, you and your Beige Suits(tm) are
>hardly out to Gordon Geckoize the known world into a
>"Family"-Values-Plus-Greed utopia for the nonfemales of uncolour.

*Nick pauses to demonstrate that he's still got enough spirit in him
to puke on hearing "family values"*

I'm not prosyletising anyone into my position, no, particularly as right
now I *have* no position. Reminds me of what Joe said though: "OK, couples
where both partners may agree uncoerced to be mono may not be *HARMfully*
[trademark Giuseppino vocal dip] fucked in the head, but they're still
fucked in the head."

Argumentative Nick would then pipe up "Fucked in the head by whose 
standards? And what's the purpose of having this standard?" *shrug* If
you want to regard me as FITH though, why should I stop you?

Not that I even WEAR beige suits that much, though (wore it to Church
yesterday; a bore, as usual, save for that lovely Greek hymn, "Thy Birth,
Christ God, dawned onto the world the light of Knowledge" --- which right
at this moment reminds me of Suzanne Vega's "What price to pay for Bad
Wisdom"...), and besides, there's a tribal element to the suit you're
ignoring: they are the *uniform* of young Greek males out at Greek
community dos, and they are a uniform I look at (even when wearing one)
at as much of a respectful distance as Joe's singlets and Kar's miniskirts.

Your quote from _The Unbearable Lightness Of Being_, btw, had me smiling
all day. I'm not sure if that's exactly what's going on with us, but it
may be, and it was a thoughtful aside to bring up, and I thank you for it.

(One *more* item on my reading list... and _Fire, Women, and Dangerous
Things_ will take me a full two months :( )

>"And like a fool I mixed em; one was
>Texas medicine, the other was just railroad gin" (Dylan, as ever).
*sigh* To be stuck inside a mobile, with those Memphis Blues again...
(How much did I freak you by being aware of _Blonde On Blonde_, Mike? :)

>Wouldn't mind seeing it again as I move on.  Y'wanna know why tradism
>freaks me out, Nick?  Watch Duvall.  "I love the smell of fresh napalm
>in the morning ... surf, soldier!"  
*smile* I understand, Mike. I wonder if the whole kaboodle is necessarily
part and parcel, or whether I cannot be eclectic and selective of it, not
necessarily out of some sense of being above it, but simply because I can't
bear to look on it as a monolith; there's stuff in it I like, and stuff in
it I hate. But this is excuses...

>>Nikos Kazantzakis: all hail, compatriot. I'll get the better of you yet...
>Oof.  You give me a sore conscience, Nick.  K's "Last Temptation" is on
>that extremely short list of books I picked up and dropped without
>completing.  

Oh shit. Mike and Nikos. Killer combo...

You see, just as you're my internalised devil's advocate on the Left,
Nikos is my internalised advocate on the Right. I read his Spiritual
Exercises and his autobiography just at the start of my current hetdom,
and my (Greek) therapist, quite a fan of Nikos', cracked up: "You read
_Askitiki'_ at THIS time in your life?!" A bad time for it indeed. Sitting 
there, fretting how any woman, any queer, any liberal in fact, can ever read 
either of those of his works and gain anything but indignation (his best 
novels overpowered his 'philosophy', but these two *codified* it) --- so 
persistently anti-woman, vehemently gender-roling all the way up his 
metaphysics, anti-liberal, anti-collectivist as well as denigrating the 
worth of the individual...

... and yet he's not an idiot, and he does have a lot to say. And just
as it will not do, just because I may not like what you or Giuseppino
have to say, for me to say "Fuck off" (and I don't, in case you were
worried :) --- so too it's just not good enough for me to say so to
Nikos. If you say "fuck off", you're not understanding. Not understanding
is not good enough.

>"feministick"?  Is that what the Thought Police beat you up with, if you
>buy them donuts and ask them really nicely?  *grin*
Thought police buy donuts too? Suddenly the whole world is turning into
an episode from the Simpons...

It may be a bit too late for me to wish you Seasons Greeting; I do want
to say, though... thank you. For spurring me on (and occasionally, 
scraping me too harsh). And apologies, if I ever let my vehemence,
dislocation, or resentment get the better of me in my responses to you.
I wish you all luck and happiness in your future career and relocation to 
California.

[That was a very stiff-Nick paragraph]

*kiss*

[That wasn't :) ]

Take care. Oh, and queer-Nick (still on holidays) sends warm regards.


^^^
Nick Nicholas, Melbourne Uni, Australia.  nsn@{munagin.ee|mundil.cs}.mu.oz.au
"Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be this nation's
number one killer"       --- Henry Gibson, Kentucky Fried Movie. 
______________________________________________________________________________
Xref: sparky soc.bi:17235 soc.motss:53575