Monday, October 12, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt ten)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

I promised to take him to a party of “straight people,” kids from my school living in New York. Everyone drank gimlets and the hostess hired an oyster shucker to come up from Baltimore with crates and crates of oysters. The most famous person at the party was the jazz composer Charles Mingus, who was in a fat, paranoid phase. Even so, he talked to us all in his intense, original way. He turned off the music and asked us to listen to the layers of silence. He insisted that total silence didn’t exist and that he could even score all the hums and swishes of the city night. Then the music came back on (it was “My Guy”) and the hostess and I grabbed large wooden ladles from Mexico and held them in front of us like penises and danced our famous spoon dance—you had to be there. We were very drunk.



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