Expensive bottle of red wine, obtained at half-price: check. Last class of first quarter of first job taught, applause received: check. Bitch-slapping a two-volume critically acclaimed Marxist critic-cum-poet who was once a quasi idol and watched me nail it at the dinner table tonight as the resident badass at a dinner celebrating his reading this evening: check check check.
Hard to explain, and yet not. A man I met a decade ago, when I was but knee-high to a grasshopper, or some such bullshit. Young, shall we say. Him, perhaps a decade and a half older, friends with my then (older) girlfriend's best friend's husband. (There have been subsequent divorces, lesbianism, Buddhist monasteries, and failed tenure cases, but that, as they say, is another story.) He was Poet. He still is, of course, as well as a pseudonymous Village Voice critic occasionally. I remember, vividly, the term "sui generis" coming up over lunch, bandied about in the midst of some hardcore Hegel/Marxist literary theory, and whilst I was just barely keeping up with the latter, not actually knowing what the former meant. Which, in hindsight, as I was studying Latin at the time, is inexcusable. I put it in the category of embarassments that began in 1st grade when I pronounced "para-dig-em" as it clearly should be pronounced.
Anyhow, he came, he saw, he read. He's hot shit, delightfully smart, and all in all a pleasure to be around. Plus, a decade? Fuckin' 'ell, how did that happen. But his fearsome intelligence, and command of literary and political theory, has been inspirational slash irritational for quite a while now. So, to command the attention of a dinner table of 9 at the end of the meal, however briefly, while expounding on old shit at the British Library and new non-developments in English law, at a table occupied by 1 painter, 2 English professors (plus myself - Boo ya), and 3 poet/writers (including a New Yorker editor! soon to be ex, but dayamn) and whoever the hell the others were....well....this is precisely what my memory has the poet doing. What I wanted to be doing. Never quite an idol in the unadulterated sense, as, thank god, I met him too late for that sort of worship to happen. But can I just say, world of me and maybe 2 or 3, that I feel GOOOOOOOOOD. Not because what I was saying was that noticeably brilliant. But because I can be the guy who works on old shit who has smart shit to say about now shit. I can be a specialist and a generalist. And yes, I'm an academic, but I always have aspired to being something much more significant, and yet much more irrelevant: a true Intellectual. (and young and charismatic whilst at it.) OK, enough ego. Happy fucking Thursday, people. It has been a good day. Any of you who have had brain surgery recently, or are facing exploratory diagnostic surgery anytime soon, I love you lots and lots and send rainbows in your general direction. Plus New York readers who read the New Yorker. I love you. Off to watch pre-downloaded crap telly. Don't tell the poet.
