“I’ve got the ineffability blues.

“I’ve got the ineffability blues. I feel paralyzed by my own inability to describe why I love Debbie Harry”

At the New Yorker, the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum has an excerpt up from his new book My 1980’s and Other Essays, and his writing is as unorthodox, ragged, glowing, Sontag-and-Barthes-in-drag as ever. This essay’s called “Debbie Harry at the Supermarket”:

In the late 1990s, I stood behind Debbie Harry in line at Sloan’s. We lived in the same apartment complex, a behemoth. Sloan’s, the unsavory supermarket around the block, was our common ground. One summer evening, a rat crawled past my flip-flop-clad feet while I waited in the checkout line. I vowed never again to wear flip-flops while food shopping. If this essay is an allegory, I’m the rat, scurrying along interpretive thoroughfares where my filth isn’t wanted.

In the late 1970s, I listened to Blondie with a fanaticism founded on my belief that Debbie Harry’s vocal delivery would give me tips on differentiating the genuine from the fake in the apocalyptic world of romantic love, where I was a befuddled amateur, working intermittently on my heterosexuality as if it were last Sunday’s crossword puzzle, a confusing grid of boxes I’d not given up trying to fill.

The essay is formally wonderful: Koestenbaum’s got this very candid quality that balances out the ecstasy of his writing, and makes his slippage between personal confession and aesthetic criticism seem effortless.

I’ve got the ineffability blues. I feel paralyzed by my own inability to describe why I love Debbie Harry; I’m trapped, like Edgar Allan Poe’s guilty narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” alone in a chamber with a ticker whose maniacal thumping, a time bomb’s, declares, “You have twenty minutes to describe Debbie Harry’s ineffable gorgeousness and irony, and if you fail, you’ll be executed.” If I decide not to explain her splendor, and to let it remain comment-free, then something in me will have perished.

The terror of being unable to explain Debbie Harry’s sublimity is built into the experience of apprehending it — the terror of being stranded with the gorgeousness, either as its proprietor or as its last living witness.

Tony Kushner wrote the introduction to Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat, about the relationship of gay men to opera, and said: “[Koestenbaum] has already let us know that the only obtainable paradise is temporary, transitory, bounded by absence, longing, sorrow, is no paradise. Paradise exists only as the object of an unending yearning.”

[TNY]