Dinner Conversations

Over dinner last night, a strange conversation. Slurping down our third meal of instant noodles and dumplings for the week, the following:
Me: You know I’m reading this Delany book, it’s a memoir of his time as a struggling writer, when he was 18 and married to Marilyn Hacker. It’s intriguing that he managed to explore his homosexual instincts so freely. I mean, he goes into a subway toilet at 125th street, looks over this other guy in the stall, they exchange smiles, then they get it on.
ET: Should I be concerned that you find homosexual explorations intriguing?
Me: No no – the point here is how easy it was. He just looked over and smiled. And it’s like a public toilet.
ET: You really need to protect your mind while you’re reading all this stuff. You don’t need to be homosexual to be good at Lit. And don’t go and try smiling at people in the toilets here.
Me: That’s not the point.
ET: You mean you’re reading the book because it’s full of homosexual encounters. If you tell me you’re homosexual, I’ll jump off the Brooklyn bridge ...
Me: Ok. I don’t go around smiling at people in the toilets. I don’t even use the urinals. I go into the stalls and close the door. But I read Delany because he’s probably the best contemporary writer I know. It’s just that when you want to have a conversation about a books with people, you need to pick out the sensational bits, to make conversation. Look here (flip flip flip) ...

“Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I’d done up from a recipe on the back of a small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I’d wander into the front bedroom – just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire escape slats to sing across the grass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water.”

He’s obviously writing in retrospect and thus poeticising the mundane. Still, this is some of the keenest description of the mundane that I’ve seen in a long time. The alliteration in the first two lines is varied with the subsequent consonant and vowels fusing the repeated “s” into the sentence, such that they don’t stick out and draw attention to themselves but bring energy to the line so that its length becomes seductive rather than laborious. And that wonderful synesthetic image of a jet spray “sing(ing) across the grass” having those twin effects -- “gem and drool” – the ornate and the primal, all on an evening of living, young and poor, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.