The new site is rather more minimal that the old one, at least at this point, but I’m in the process of building an area for Diamond and Sapphire with many of the old features, such as discussion forums and graphic tutorials. And a special welcome to new users! More to come very soon. Reach me at geoffreyalexander@me.com
I was on a date once in San Francisco with a fashion designer who was (and owing not to this fact only) a virtuoso in the art of self-invention. She was in fact, so often so far from her genuine self as to seem as some sort of walking theatre, though without the drama thankfully. We were discussing literature (I had met her a few weeks earlier at one of my public readings) and I made the comment to her as how many of the characters in literature — the Hamlets, the Hucks, the Raskolnikovs even — seemed as real to me as the actual persons we know, schlepping around. More real, in fact.
Now in most ways, most people would let this slide off to the side as a kind of metaphor, but I played it up insistently to see what see how she’d take it. She took it as a pathological thing on my part, stating, flat out, “Geoffrey, you have a real problem…”.
She meant this two different ways, I think, both in the sense that I had a problem with what was real (ontologically if not psychologically) as well as the fact that what you might call my perspective on things was likely going to be a problem in regards to the development of our relationship. As for the former issue I couldn’t say, but as regards the latter she certainly did possess the facts as we pretty much went nowhere after that.
What I did not tell her then — nor ever told her later (would I have done so, given the chance?) — is that I was quoting a fictional character, from Dostoyevsky in fact. It was in other words, a fictional character’s attitude she considered a real problem. And to be quite frank, I don’t know whether it was her difficulty with the attitude I evidenced, or the irony of her disapprobation, or the fact she couldn’t catch the literary reference, for which I came to disregard her so thoroughly.
