Carole Maso and the Threnody of Aesthetic Desire......

When I was a junior attending Illinois State University I tried to seduce Visiting Writer Carole Maso. I had read her delicate novel "AVA" three years prior and had fallen head-over-Doc Martens in love with her poetic ardor, tithed sensuality, lavishing, sumptuous syntax and overall succulent jazz moonlight-stillness slipped into every stanza --she is one of the few writers who possesses the ability to gently chisel out museums of sound into every sentence she produces (It's almost as if the privy reader feels the blanketed galactic warmth of an angel subtly exhaling next to you in the middle of the night--sharing your pillow, a nocturnal breath of dream hope lulling your ear). The fact that Carole Maso herself is a DAMN FINE classy scholar and teaches creative writing at BROWN failed to hinder the culmination of my sophomoric libidinous conquest in the slightest and I arrived at the reading juggling gumdrop visions of the accomplished literary goddess nestled up in my dorm room, our lips volleying stanzas of Keats, Byron and Bronte between our chins before succumbing to the scent of her chamomile kisses. The goal I oriented for myself was simply to say something to Miss Maso that no other human being had ever said before. To (as she had done for me in her prose) add something to the collective discourse of the humanities using the medium of voice and sound. Something that would leave an indelible love-rash into her memory. I arrived at the gala two hours early and by the time she entered I was stationed agape-mouthed in the front row voluntarily clueless as to what my immortal author-seducing comment might be. The reading was a bouquet of echoes mingled with linguistic vistas. The author ravished the audience with never-before-read scrolls culled from a fetus draft of a pending novel. She stood gracefully above her attentive audience, the buxom mast of a maiden vessel, her body engulfed in a syncopated sway, her lips forming erotic key signatures with every plosive intonation. Miss Maso hurtled sounds of feminine wrath--Eve endeavoring to convey her sexual frustration to Adam in triumphant animalistic caterwauls and snug salivated grunts. She read excerpts of poetic grandeur, tossing her shoulders towards the crowd, swaying in a metronomic parlance, her eyes and body lost in fervor resembling a creature that was haphazardly tossing shards of antique furniture in an incinerating snap of a human conflagration. I milled around the conference room at the end of the reading while fellow undergrads and literary toadies huddled around the author; their arms outstretched with recently purchased copies of her work like wounded wings. When I finally accumulated the gall, gulped and accosted her I alighted my hand in a gesture of thanksgiving, embracing the smooth interior texture of her palm, I muttered out the following ill-contrived canticle. "Miss Maso," I stuttered in still-life awe. "When you were reading just now. It was so beautiful....It was so beautiful. It sounded like someone was going down on my heart." The Eternal Scribe looked at me and at the word "heart" her body jumped. Her shoulders jilted. Her eyes opened the way the sun opens up into sleek, lavender corners of early morning atmosphere. She then silently smiled, blushed and jolted her fingers into my wrist manacled in a grapple of white dactyls. "I could see you in the front row." She said, a neon electric tilt of excitement glued to her voice. "I was reading just for you." *** I had failed in my germinal quest to seduce of a conspicuous literary celebrity. There would be no fellow male gloating and embellished boasting in the linguistic locker room to fellow toga clad novice poets and forensic fags. Miss Maso never entered my dorm room to marvel over my selected crop of Dalkey Archive titles. There would be no promises. NO poetic banter. NO shouting out of first names in the urine-saturated dank of dormitories. But what I learned that day was all in the manner of the squeeze. It was in the method her nails gnawed at the pallid interior whiteness of my wrist. It was the way her lashes batted in my direction when I told her that her prose, "sounded like someone was going down on my heart." It was the covenant of her breath that when she said, "I was reading just for you," which this formative writer intuited as something like this: "We're in this profession together. It's a shit profession and it's damn fucking lonely at times. But this is the life we've chosen. Let's give as much of ourselves to this vocation as we possibly can so when other's need us, they won't have to necessarily endeavor to seduce us, they can just prop open the sleeve of our narratives to find solace and maybe hope." That said, for those of you out in the circus of cyberland willing to give yourselves, your life and your talents to that which is greater than yourself, don't be surprised if you feel a snap at the interior whiteness of your wrist before finding yourself encircled in an endless cloud of smiles.