Freud & P.E.

"Years of rigorous empirical research have finally confirmed that Freud was right about penis envy. Just wrong about which sex suffers from it."
— Carol Tavris

Why Reading Is So Addictive

From time to time, some of you "confess" at meetings that you just couldn't get into the title we're discussing that evening.  A few of you admit you can't imagine trying again, but most of you indicate you feel the call of duty to finish the book, or at least make a good-faith effort to do so.  (A Little Life is one recent example of this phenomenon.)

If you've ever wondered about the psychology of the decision to keep reading a book you don't enjoy, I commend the following short article to you: "Why It's So Hard to Stop Reading Books You Don't Even Like."

"3 DEVIATES INVITE EXCLUSION BY BARS"

— New York Times  April 22, 1966 headline (p. 43). Headline surprised me while reading the Post 's obituary today, even shocked me (though it was the Sixties and the Times was very late to go "gay"). But recalls the New Yorker 's affectionate pre-obituary of just two months ago, which I'm finally linking to now that the party's over (and what a good dying he seems to have had!).

Dick Leitsch (rhymes with…) — Here's mud in your eye!

Man in An Orange Shirt / Aerodynamics of Pork

Last Sunday one of DC's PBS stations broadcast "Man in An Orange Shirt". Both Terry and I liked it. You may decide whether you might by looking at the trailer. Fortunately, Howard University's WHUT–Ch. 32 (the other PBS station) is broadcasting it next Tuesday 6/26 at 8pm (with rebroadcasts on Wednesday 6/27 at midnight and Sunday 7/1 at 4pm).

All this might seem a bit off topic except that the screenplay of the Masterpiece Theatre movie is written by Patrick Gale (his first!), whom many of us became aware of 33 years ago with his first novel The Aerodynamics of Pork. We read his short story "The List" in Edmund White's Fraser Book of Gay Short Fiction. And I just read his short story "Cooking", an appropriately delicious story of what happens to a homophobic father when his other children dump him on their "single" younger brother.

Patrick Gale has written several novels and a couple of short story collections. I think we might enjoy reading something by him. Maybe others have already and can help with recommendations.

"The End of Eddy" ends in "A History of Violence"

As referenced in John's post below, Édouard Louis' third book Qui a tué mon pere has occasioned quite a stir in Paris. Coincidentally, his second book A History of Violence has been translated and appears in America next week. How many of us will be able to not read it right away!?

Édouard Louis in today's Post

"How a 25-year-old writer became France’s most outspoken advocate for the working class."

The Gay Novel is Dead

I think as such it has had its day. It rose in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties in response to these new opportunities and new challenges and the two big clarities — the one of liberation and the one of Aids — and there was an urgency, a novelty to the whole thing. In our culture at least those things are no longer the case. I observe that the gay novel is dissolving back into everything else and we are living increasingly in a culture where sexuality is not so strongly defined.

—Alan Hollinghurst quoted in The Times, 4.6.18.  Matthew Todd disagrees.