So upon reading Harper’s for the first time in some time, I confess I find it horribly horribly pretentious. It has the post-visceral taint of well-fed white liberalism, if that makes sense. The extended essay on dissent is more rambling than a drunken me. Maybe I am allergic to higher-quality paper, or the pooh-poohness of it all: this is simply not muscular prose, it is too upholstered in a florid print. I guess it’s also already long-obvious the things pointed out: the similarities between the present American imperialism and that of a century ago. So maybe I’m jaded: I guess I’m curious as to what the demographic for this magazine is, as well as what the further-left reception is (not great, I’d imagine). To think that I’d once wanted to work for these guys…

Ah, yes: the Post, which I read as my daily dose of right-wing nonsense, and also for signs of cracks in the Bush edifice, which is actually happening blessedly more and more often, today has a second headline of “Gay High,” which is apparently just good ol’ Harvey Milk given a head. Hrmm… I guess it would be nice to be able to bring Joephet to school, but at the same time, I feel as if I am ill-equipped to deal with quite so much high school bujiiness. Still, one must give some thought to the Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long’s query, “Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math?”

Well, I can say from personal experience that in gay math, combinatorics (how many outfits?) is much more important. And your word problems tend to be set at Sephora. But that is an inside joke. And I am a terribly dressed gay math teacher, hehe, so I was famous for the (illustrative) question, “Mr. Hu has five dress shirts and one pair of pants. How many outfits does he have?” It’s great to be able to deflect your students’ accusations of buggery with a simple, “Not with these shoes…”

So I been lazy on this day my day off, which as expected has become this deep sink where there is to be no real math to be done, though I am somehow reading yet more short fiction, with the hope that perhaps some of it will rub off and I will gain the sort of fluency I will need to make some of my own. Not so much a matter of imitative strokes, but more the direction of orienting myself, as it were, as this is not something I’ve given much thought to. It’s also difficult, because old Alric, for all his ambitions in fictional directions (heehee: I’m going to have to blog that little one-liner), confesses not to often read women authors. Which seems rather important if I am to write biting SAPI fiction (At Alric’s suggestion, “Straight Asian/Pacific Islander” is more clear-cut, with the requisite counterpart “GAPI”).

See, I’ve been trying to blog about class-assumptions in fiction for some time now, but in all my attempts come across as something of a prig. But it’s a big deal, still. Like at the year-end reception for the teachers at my school at the Brooklyn Marriott, where some teachers were unable to identify all the cheeses present–Cheddar, Havarti, Brie. I mean, brie, goddammit! This is not rocket science. So the point is that any work of fiction–any type of discourse, really–has class-assumptions about it which can be difficult to somehow overcome–and this is the hesitancy that I feel, though of course it’s deeper than this one trivial manifestation–I just don’t quite know how to verbalize it yet. But I feel this way about most art, which is, I realize, somehow foolish, but perhaps no more foolish than some soaring praise of the universality of art and beauty and all that. I guess I recognize the barriers but have yet to rest upon their ultimate significance. And it’s not as if I don’t love a good Waugh story.