Activity Report: Monsieur Three Stars, Others

On Reading My Old Blogs During My Birthday Month

Coin with Sign of Leo, dated 1033 AH/1624 CE

This is my birthday month. Yes, I am a Leo. I wasn’t sure what my birthday present to myself would be and then I ran into an exboyfriend at a party at Mark Doty’s house for Jason Schneiderman near Kinderhook, and he told me about a sweater with an owl on it and I knew with a clarity that rarely arrives that this was it. I ordered it on my phone surrounded by gay men in Mark’s garage, a tub of ice and beers at my feet.

My Instagram friends know I post owls when I’m sad. The sight of them wards off despair. I probably should have bought a week of owl sweaters. Perhaps I’ll find others.

*

All month I’ve been going through old blogs for material that I abandoned there. 264 Wordpress drafts and 53 Tumblr drafts specifically. I think of these as the notes and diaries I wrote accidentally, like the emails that I do not send—my 4690 gmail drafts, going back to when I started my beta account back in 2004. But this continues back to the letters I never sent, sitting in notebooks inside of boxes currently in my closet, alongside, well, many unfinished diaries.

I am a poor diarist, basically. But it turns out I do all of this other writing instead. Some of these old blog drafts are just a title, like “Some Other, Better Liberaces,” which was turned out to be the start of a post about Helen DeWitt’s very funny and operatically ambitious novel, The Last Samurai, but some have anecdotes and observations and the details found in the moment that you often can’t remember or fake or invent with the same specific clarity. These drafts—on Twitter, on Instagram, on any social media platform—have been a rich source of material for me over the years. Several of the essays in my first essay collection for example began as blog posts, and the collection I will eventually publish in a few years after the new novel will have a few essays that began in that blog or maybe even the blog before that. No doubt some of these newsletters will eventually go on to a life in a book, revised or bowdlerized or both.

I went into these drafts chasing after a few things I could remember, and found a lot that I could not remember. I went specifically because I am researching the era of the Financial Crisis for my next novel and was interested in the posts I made back then in 2007-2008. But it occurred to me to look for the posts I wrote and did not publish. A post about writing for exposure, unfinished, seemed especially ironic.

In my Wordpress drafts, I found this amusing short-short story prompt from the fall of 2008.

For a short-short story, in the present tense…

Make a list of 4 locations:
A miniature golf course
A bank
Marshes
A dentist chair

Use 1.

Make a list of 3 Personal moments:
Going into your basement to search for something.
Walking around your house naked.
Looking at every single photo of a person on Facebook.

Use all of these.

Make a list of 3 words you either hate or love:
Nozzle
Peachy
Tinkle

Use all of them.

*

I still post sometimes on my Tumblr. It is often stuff about comics. But I was very happy to be reunited with an excerpt from Marie Jenney Howe’s translation of George Sand’s journals, which I had read as a part of researching my second novel, The Queen of the Night. Sand was about as bad as me about keeping journals.

[After an interregnum of two years and a half, George Sand comes across her mislaid notebook and recalls that she once intended to keep a continuous journal. The solitude which conduces to introspective writing had been broken by her stay in Majorca with Chopin. She has but lately returned to Nohant. During her absence the notebook had evidently been carried to the attic. She resumes the journal in a cheerful mood.]

--Do tell me, why haven't you gone on with your journal? (Probably it is Monsieur Three Stars or Madame So-and-So or Mesdemoiselles X.Y.Z. who ask me this question).

--What? You have carelessly mislaid a book as rare, precious and original as that?

--Even so. And my book is as well bound as it is carefully edited. In fact, the contents are as valuable as the cover.

--Don't joke about anything as important as your notebook. I'm sure it is a work of art.

--Ah, you say that to the author!

--Indeed I wish I had found it myself. I would never have given it back to you.

--What the devil would you have done with it?

--I would have cut out all the autographs to paste in my album.

--I don't understand what you mean.

--Doesn't your book contain scraps of handwriting by the various authors, artists, politicians and prominent assassins?

--Yes, I have some rather literary letters, but why do you want them?

--To show that I own them.

--Oh, I understand!

--Besides, why should you wish to keep them for yourself?

--Well, the handwriting helps me to judge people's characters.

--Can you really read character from handwriting?

--Yes, I make a success of it when I know beforehand what the handwriting should prove.

--What would you say of your own?

--My own? I would describe it as tired writing.

--And you conclude?

--That it is the writing of a tired person.

--Is that all?

--Isn't that enough?

--But of what is the person tired?

--Can't you imagine that one may be tired of many things? Tired of getting up every morning, tired of going to bed every night, tired of being hot all summer and cold all winter, tired of hearing innumerable questions asked and never one that is worth answering--

Sand’s eventual published journal is quite slender, though she did write 70 novels, as well as plays, criticism, and a 1000 page autobiography modestly titled “My Life.” But it is still a favorite of mine from her body of work for the playfulness she allowed herself in these occasional pages.

And Monseiur Three Stars is an epithet that just flies across time to the present. Where it will stay with me for the exactly perfect moment to use it. Maybe I’ll even put it on a t-shirt.

*

It was hard to think back about how many issues there have been popular support for that have been defeated by America’s intensely gerrymandered and corrupt political system, differently visible in the blog posts from that time. National healthcare, a higher minimum wage, gun control, a tax on the rich, all struggle along, unpopular only in Congress. We can add to that an end to supporting the assault on Gaza. We are not currently enforcing our own laws in these matters. Many students on our campuses are being punished more for protesting this than anyone currently breaking international law. And while the protesters are presented as being extremists, they have the support of many citizens for many of their demands.

There are two fundraisers for Gazans I have been whipping support for on my other social media, for Walid Al Zaq, and Walaa Safi. Both are near their halfway mark. Walaa is a paraplegic and is apparently living now in a greenhouse. I can’t imagine escaping bombs guided by AI with children and in a wheelchair. If there are any fundraisers you would like to support as we go into this payday weekend/holiday weekend please leave them in the comments. As a benchmark, roughly 100$ of what you pay in taxes each year goes into the astonishing number of bombs dropped on Gaza—I began last year by donating at least that amount and then have since gone much further. Every now and then someone asks about why it is so expensive to get Gazans out of Gaza to Egypt and the answers are not great. It is a terrible price to pay to save them and Egypt doesn’t want them as it is, making it illegal for them to work when they arrive. Now the crossing into Egypt at Rafah has been closed by Israel after they took it over, a part of the killing jar effect there. In any case, most Gazans in Gaza or Egypt cannot make any kind of income right now, and are struggling for basic survival needs after being displaced multiple times, without access to clean drinking water, food or medication.

It was often mentioned in early press coverage of Oct. 7th that Gaza was almost half children but without any context. Who will say it, I wondered. The answer was NPR would say it, which even surprised me honestly but here it is:

Many Palestinians simply don't get the chance to grow old — dying in their early adulthood either in conflicts or due to a struggling healthcare system — which drags the averages down.

I think about that all the time.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee