Fun Home

On my November 30th blog entry I mentioned that I would finish reading Fun Home. One of the pivotal reason was the standard of language. So after procrastinating for a while I finally finished it. No doubt its verbose and its a veritable treat to see the author's penmenship. The following are the notes for me and I am sure I will be coming back to this again and again.
When other children called our house a mansion, I would demur. I resented the implication that my family was rich, or unusual in any way
The Gilt Cornices, The marble fireplace, The crystal chandeliers, The shelves of calf bound books. These were not so much brought as produced from thin air by my fathers remarkable legerdemain.
His greatest achievement arguably was his monomaniacal restoration of our home.
He was alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a dandelion of
The shutters and scroll work were gone. The clapboards had been sheathed with scabrous shingles.
He blithely betrayed the king, for example, when the queen asked him to build her a cow disguise so she could seduce the white bull.
What do you think of this glass chandelier -- Bordello
I developed a contempt for useless ornament. What function was served by the scrolls, tassels and bric a brac that infested our house.
Incipient yellow lung disease.
If anything they obscured function. They were embellishments in the worst sense. They were lies.
He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.
It is tempting to suggest in retrospect that our family was a sham.
That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum.
I can't find the scissors! look in the Chippendale.
How did this vase got so close to the table ?
Most people I imagine, learn to accept that they are not prefect, but an idel remark about my father over breakfast could send him into tailspin.
If we couldn't criticize my father showing affection for him was an even dicier venture.
His shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany. In fact, the meticulous, period interiors were expressly designed to conceal it.
His burst of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark
Although I am good at enumerating my father's flaw its hard for me to sustain much anger at him.
Th suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me... The sudden unbearable cold of its absence.
But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time i knew him.
His death was quite possibly his consummate artifice, his masterstroke.
Do people contemplating suicide get excited about spotting rufous sided towhee.
But these are just quibble. I don't believe it was an accident.
His headstone is an obelisk, a striking anachronism among the ungainly granite slabs inn the new end of the cemetery.. I was also a shape that in life he was unabashedly fixated on.
He had an obelisk collection, in fact, and his prize specimen was one in knee high jade that propped open the door to his library.
His ultimate obelisk is not carved from fleshy, translucent marble like the tombstones in the old part of the cemetery.
Wearing a black velvet dress my father had wrestled me into I appear to be in mourning.
What gave the comparison real weight was the family business.. and the cavalier attitude which inevitably, we come to take toward it.
I bicycled back to my apartment marveling at the dissonance between this apparently carefree activity and my newly tragic circumstance.
For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as "the library" might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.
Dod that require such a leap of imagination? perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense.
Part of dad's country squire routine involved edifying the villagers - his more promising high school students
But her return epistle arrived a week and half later.
There is a scene in the great Gatsby where a drunken party guest is carried away by the discovery that the volumes in Gatsby's library are not card board fakes
My father's books-- the hardbound ones with their ragged dust jackets, the paperbacks with their creased spines-had clearly been read.\
But in a way Gatsby's pristine books and my father's worn ones signify the same thing- the preference of a fiction to reality.
Of all his domestic inclinations, my father's decided bent for gardening was the most redolent to me of that other, more disturbing bent.
What kind of a man but a sissy could possibly love flowers this ardently ?
During the ensuing hunt, we would be sure to find a yellow egg in a thatch of daffodils, a lavander egg passing itself off as a crocus..and nestled in the crab apple tree, a pink egg the precise shade of the blossoms that would soon burst from there
There my father would become lost to us in a revery of weeding.
Come on. We're going dogwood napping. I found some beauts on the mountain road.
A pink dogwood flower is the most beautiful shade of pink in the world.
Is there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was marcel proust.
I sensed a chink in my family's armor, an undefended gap in the circle of our wagons which cried out, it seemed to me, fo some plain, two fisted sinew.
Where is your barrette ? It keeps the hair out of your eyes.
Hey Butch think fast - no one needed to explain what it meant.
It was self-descriptive, cropped, curt, percussive, practically onomatopoeic at any rate, the opposite of sissy.
And despite the tyrannical power with which he held sway, it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy.
Where is your barrette. I don't care! next time i see you without it, I'll wale you.
It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation.
It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for thta matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all ?
In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.
In the hot august afternoon, the city was reduced, like a long simmering demiglace, to a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity.
I have a hallucinogenic memory of a throbbing welter of people in a large circle. It must have been washington square park.
May be I was experiencing a contact high from the LSD trips no doubt swirling around us.
Might not a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air.
How much did my mother's milieu factor into his attraction.Had he somehow conflated her with her address.
Eighty sixed ! To refuse to serve (an unwelcome customer) at a bar or restaurant.
But the village in the early eighties was a cold, mercenary place.
Oh, and , bruce, can you take this with you? If elsie finds it she'll have my hide.
My brother ignored me. But looking back my stratagem strikes me as a precocious feat of proustian tranposition - not to mention a tidy melding of poust's real alfred and his fictional albertine.
On the drive home, a postlapsarian melancholy crept over me. I had failed some unspoken initiation rite and life's possibilities were no longer infinite.
The serpent is vexingly ambiguous archetype.
But the vision of the truck driving bulldyke sustained me through the years..as perhaps it haunted my father.
And so his death had an inevitably dimming, crepuscular effect.
Typically with some degree of pyrotechnic splendor, due to particulates from the pre-clean air act paper mill ten miles away.
With similar perversity, the sparkling creek that coursed down from the plateau and through our town was crystal clear precisely becaues it was polluted. Mine runoff had left the water too acidic to support life of any kind.
It's childish, perhaps, to grudge them the sustenance of their creative solitude.
Then came the invisible substance that hung in doorways, and that, I soon realized, hung like swags of drapery between all solid objects.
Thanks seem a feeble offering indeed, but I hope you will take it.
And my father's life was a solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide
Dad gave me a wall calaendar from one of his vendors to write in, a curious memnto mori.
It was a sort of epistemological crisis. How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true.
My simple, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic at best, utter lies at worst.
The most sturdy nouns faded to faint approximations under my pen.My "I thinks" were gossamer sutures in that gaping rift between signifier and signified. To fortify them, I perseverated until they were blots.
My diary was rapidly becoming as onerous as the rest of my life.
Soon I began drawing it right over names and pronouns. It became a sort of amulet, warding off evil from my subjects.
Again the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.
My deracination was kindly abetted by various friends at college.
At breakfast that morning he'd been in a jacket and tie, not his usual vacation dishabille of cut-off Jeans.
The sudden approximation of my dull provincial life to a new yorker cartoon was exhilarating.
But my father's abject and shameful mien quickly sobered me up.
The juxtaposition of the last days of childhood with those of Nixon and the end of that larger, national innocence may seem trite. But it was only one of many heavy-handed plot devices to befall my family during those strange, hot months.
Whether or not my harmonal fluctuations were its cause, chaos was most assuredly afoot in our household that summer.
Our visit was a veritable saturnalia. A two day binge of nonstop play.
My enjoyment was unencumbered by any knowledge of wilde's martyrology.
Or perhaps my reasoning was more influenced by social studies than math. Gaps, erasures and other lacunae had saturated the news for the past year.
As soon as I shut the window, the rain hit it like a firehose.
Yet the house itself had escaped harm, as had the garage and cars. Even the cat sauntered home not just unscathed but dry.
To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instict in my body.
Dad got another bureau for my room.
My forced nonchalance about the men's fashion supplement, for example was self repudiation of the basest kind.
But the immersion like green dish washing liquid bathing a cuticle left me supple and open to possibility.
Or maybe I am trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously to a more coherent narrative, a narrative of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable..
There is a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia. But that's problematic line of thought and for another it leads to a peculiarly literal cul-de-sac.
In my earliest memories, dad is a lowering, malevolent presence.
Preternaturally handsome football player who was currently helping dad haul junk out of our basement.
He makes a pass at hold. Did any of you twits read this. Awesome capacity for cognitive dissonance.
Could this Hobson's choice have been a form of divine intervention.
And indeed, I embarked that day on an odyssey which, consisting as it did in a gradual episodic, and inevitable convergence with my abstracted father was very nearly as epic as the original.
Home for Christmas, I found dad's delight about Ulysses a bit galling.
I hadn't mentioned my big lesbian epiphany yet. So dad's choice was interesting, to say the least.
I referred back to colette herself, basking in her sensualism as perhaps the sea ravaged odysseus had in the ministrations of Nausicca.
I was adrift on the high seas, but my courage was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family.
Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever.
It was not, at any rate a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it was gone.
There was a certain solemnity to the moment.
I can't stand it any more. This house is a tinderbox.
The gay group at school is picketing that movie cruising.
It was not the sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus.
I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.
We had our Ithaca moment.
In our case of course, substitute the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of homosexual magnetism.
In a telling mistake, dad imputes the beseeching eyes to bloom instead to his wife molly.
But how could he admire joyce's lengthy, libidinal "yes" so fervently and end up saying "no" to his own life.
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect.Sexual shame is ini itself a kind of death.
Ulysses, of course, was banned for many years by people who found its honesty obscene.
But i suppose this is consistent with the book's theme that spiritual, not con substantial, paternity is the important thing.
Is it so unusual for the two things to coincide.
What if Icarus hadn't hurtled into the sea? What if he'd inherited his father's inventive bent? What might he have wrought?
He did hurtle into the sea, of course.
But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.