Proust/Lonely

Lonely Christopher below responds to our slightly redacted version of the Proust Questionnaire.

Summary of Contestant “Lonely Christopher”

Lonely Christopher has been described as “an emerging queer writer and playwright” who tries establishing that, in his words, “human drama and the poetics of structural signification are kind of the same thing.” He is a founding member of The Corresponding Society (soon to release issue three of Correspondence); co-director of the Institutionalized Theatre (reuniting to stage a new production in March); a regular featured reader for diverse crowds; plus his poetry chapbooks have become staples of the Small Anchor Press catalog (Satan and two editions of Gay Plays). His plays have been translated into Mandarin and produced internationally. Most recently, his shared long-form verse collection Into (with Robert Snyderman and Christopher Sweeney) has been announced for the 2010 publication schedule of Seven Circles Press. His collection of short stories, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, will be released by Akashic in 2011. His future projects include libretti and fiction. Lonely lives in Brooklyn.

Lonely Christopher Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Intelligence.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Femininity.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Generosity.

Your chief characteristic.
Existential embarrassment.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
My best friends are those I can sit silently in a room with as we read books for hours.

Your main fault.
My personality.

Your favorite occupation.
Something useful with words.

Your idea of happiness.
Daydreaming and listening to Mozart or late Beethoven (or Ravel).

Your idea of misery.
A very long car ride.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Lady GaGa.

Where would you like to live?
In Brooklyn, but in a more gentrified neighborhood. (Honesty is ugly.)

Your favorite prose authors.
Herman Melville, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett.

Your favorite poets.
Gertrude Stein, William Shakespeare, John Ashbery.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Dracula, Hamlet, Jesus Christ.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Catherine Earnshaw, Agave, Lolita.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Henry Darger, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon. Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, Benjamin Britten.

Your heroes in “real life.”
Any artist (writer, actor, musician, &c.) who dies from an overdose of pills before the age of forty.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Joe McCarthy, Charles J. Guiteau (and anyone else who ever assassinated a prominent personality for idiot reasons), God.

Your favorite names.
I know of a kid named Lancelot Runge but we aren’t friends.

What do you hate the most?
Existence and death.

What military event do you admire the most?
The Stonewall Riots. I wrote an explanation then deleted it.

What reform do you admire the most?
All nonviolent civil/human rights reform.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Musicality.

How do you wish to die?
Misadventure.

What is your present state of mind?
Neurotic. Also, worried how nationalistic and phallocentric these my answers are.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
The unjustified privilege of physical beauty.

Your favorite motto.
We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire.