Alec Mouhibian

I have piece in American Spectator on bullshit majors.

Go ahead and rave an ambitious play like August: Osage County, if you must. But at least warn us if it contains the following line, which some discerning customers might consider a dead giveaway of its actual quality:

I’m white and over 30 — I don’t get in trouble!

“This is absolutely a political parable,” says August’s playwright Tracy Letts, in the program notes to the Los Angeles production of his big hit. Well, political parables are known to corrupt art, and absolute political parables…corrupt even more than non-absolute ones.

What is set down in orderly and seemly sentences, even today, always has some flavor in it of the stilted rubbish that the Sumerian kings used to engrave upon their tombs. The current cliches get into it inevitably; it is never quite honest. Complete honesty, intellectually, seldom expresses itself in formal words: its agents of notification are rather winks and sniggers, hip flasks and dead cats.

– H.L. Mencken, against blogging

After a specially successful performance, with everyone crying, an admirer asked “How do you do it?” Mahalia fixed the full force of her being on him.

“Don’t you KNOW,” she said in disgust.

In an essay on the various qualities of wetting the whistle, philosopher Roger Scruton delineates the Puritan roots of binge-drinking. I made the same point (in my own stilted and clumsy way) three years ago in the Daily Bruin.

This gives me all the confidence I need to continue my campaigns against traveling, dessert, and waking up.

God 1: They look like ants from up here.

God 2: What do the ants look like?

[Laughter]

Peter the Great thought beards were anti-European. He outlawed them. Ayn Rand thought beards were masks for psychological problems. She condemned them. But the beard of my uncle poured love into the soul of every beard-hater. There was mystery in the beard, but honesty, too. It made him a man of ideas, but also a man of the earth. (“Terrorist,” said some among us, but that was the lazy man’s way of saying the same thing.) The beard revealed contradiction in him, but also timelessness and universality, and I always believed that if there was any one man who could seduce angels, it was him.

Then he shaved his beard. Samson spun in his grave. Armies of angels withdrew from the earth. And when my uncle walked into a house party last night, women huddled over margaritas turned pale and whispered their new agonies to each other. The men were relieved of envy, but even envious men were hurt to know that a remarkable thing of beauty had been erased. Just what stale thought had convinced him to slice the poetry from his face and send it down a two-inch hole in some sink in Northridge, Calif.?

Some blamed the wife. Others blamed the man himself. A preacher forecast the end times. There were at least two judges in the room, and at least a dozen lawyers, but there was nothing anybody could do to bring the beard back.

Only time can do that. And until it does, I will refuse to talk to my uncle, or to call him by his name. I have rearranged its letters, and I have found that they settle into a suitable anagram: “Measlier Shaven.”

In death, we are all equals.

But I lost this consolation, too—lost it on the grounds of Cemitaire du Pere Lachaise on a spooky, wind-swept Paris afternoon.

H.L. Mencken once defined a cynic as “a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a funeral.” But I swear there was something infinitely more cynical in the movements of this wandering tourist who, in desperate search for a funeral, began to look around for flowers.

My cemetery map had proven to be useless, you understand, and so I quickly realized that I had no other recourse but to find my favorite graves by their flowers. That is how I found Chopin and Moliere. That is how I all-too-quickly found Jim Morrison of The Doors, who lay under a pile of grandiose red roses.

Balzac, Proust, and Wilde were much less decorated—and more elusive.

Oh, but Wilde—the poorest of them all! Only a few defeated tulips lay by his gravestone. The inscription had all but faded, along with its meaning. I read out loud: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity’s long broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn.” These outcasts, they should mourn with flowers, I thought.

Hours I spent in the cemetery, and afternoon swelled into evening, but I felt so unfulfilled by my visit, so disappointed and humiliated by the flowers game.

I attempted to dissolve my humiliation in a cup of coffee at the historic Hotel des Beaux Arts. I sat on a sofa next to a bookshelf, and admired the old volumes of literature that were assembled there. Then I noticed the two framed photographs. The first was of a middle-aged Oscar Wilde; he had died at this hotel in 1900. The second was of a young Argentine boy who would grow to be Jorge Luis Borges, the great man of myths and letters whose imagination these very alcoves had once unleashed.

Two women sitting nearby noticed my interest in the photographs.

“Are you a writer?” the brunette asked in English.

I looked at her for the first time and noticed she was young and beautiful.

“Yes,” I said.

“How nice,” said the blonde, equally beautiful. “We are here with a writer, too.”

“Who?” I asked.

“He’s very famous here,” the blonde said.

“What does he write?” I asked, wondering if they were going to sleep with him.

“Trash,” the brunette said, laughing mischievously.

“Cocaine and parties,” the blonde clarified—meaning, probably, yes.

And in walked the tall, bearded man of maybe forty, sat down, yelled out for drinks, and turned his attention onto me.

“Thank you for entertaining the girls,” he said sincerely. “Ahh, women. Beautiful and painful. Don’t you agree?”

“I agree,” I said, “but you must find more beauty than pain.”

“Now they are beautiful; later they will be painful,” he said, and I told him those were wonderful words and that I would like to use them.

We spoke of Camus and swimming pools and all sorts of things (except cabbages and kings) and, at the end of it, we scribbled our identities in notepads, and promised to read each other.

I was in a softer mood now and, outside, so were the winds. I walked down toward St. Germain, past the cozy cafés where Sartre once sat, and past the brasserie where once Hemingway had a serving of some very inspirational potato salad. I was happier with Paris now.

And I expressed my happiness that night to my Parisian friend. I sat at his kitchen table and told him about my day and the flowers and the kind, quick-witted man I met at the Hotel des Beaux Arts.

“What was his name?” my friend asked.

I pulled out my notepad, flipped it to the seventy-third page, and handed it over.

My friend drew a grand smile.

He shouted: “You met F—!”

“I did.” I said. “But who is he?”

“He’s very, very famous,” my friend said. “He’s a novelist. He’s been in movies.” My friend drew another smile. This time there was a trace of envy. I smiled, too, marveling in my unexpected literary moment, until my friend continued to speak.

“But I hate him,” my friend announced.

“Why?” I asked, almost defensively.

And here my friend fell back into form and went on and on, pretending he had never smiled, saying how that man F— was a shallow, womanizing fraud, a pretender, a bourgeois-boheme, and how that line about women and beauty and pain, it wasn’t even his—F— had stolen it!

“From whom?” I asked sorrowfully.

“Baudelaire, of course!” my friend said, smiling again.

“Right,” I said, and I began to wonder how many flowers Baudelaire had on his grave.

– His Girl Friday

My Washington City Paper cover story about college rags is now out. Reviewed in the piece are the official papers of Georgetown, George Washington, Catholic U, Howard, Maryland, and American. Read it here or, if you happen to be interning in D.C., pick up a copy at your nearest bathhouse.

My lament of Washington’s pitiful new baseball stadium is up at American Spectator.

What follows are the concluding sentences of an article in the upcoming issue of a major magazine.

“It’s the most awesome place ever,” she says.

For once, Hesse sounds like she’s 26.

The New York Review of Magazines, a magazine produced by graduate students at Columbia’s journalism school and published by Victor Navasky, legendary editor of The Nation, is now live. It includes my feature piece about the Baghdad blogger who incited a war between The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, as well as my comparative review of Liberty and Reason magazines. Also, don’t miss the profile of the literary Christopher Hitchens, a report on the style of early Esquire, and many other dispatches from the magazine world.

I haven’t been blogging because thoughts, lately, haven’t appeared to me in their usual small, manageable doses. They spill over their own shadows now, and into new ones. The other day I was jogging in Riverside Park, jogging six or seven paces behind a man on roller blades. It was his first time, obviously, and he almost slipped and fell into the river a few times. I decided that, if he should fall into the river, I’d sprint and dive right after him. I had some instinctive sympathy for this strange man, in part because I guessed from his clothes and roller blades that he was new to this country. Being sentimental in these things, I prepared myself to jump. But then my way home opened up to the right. I almost wanted to keep following the man, knowing full well that once I lost sight of him, I’d also lose my responsibility for him. I didn’t follow him, and I went my own way, but I’ve been thinking about him to this day, wondering if he fell into the river.