Re-starting Bookmen DC on Facebook.

I created a new Facebook group for Bookmen DC, becuase of the technical difficulties with the old one. I will try to send invites through Facebook to those of you who were already members. You should be able to find it by searching for "Bookmen DC". thanks

Heartbeats

Following up on our discussion last night: John Musto's setting of Melvin Dixon's poem, "Heartbeats" (p. 86 in Persistent Voices) is the title track of a beautiful CD titled "Heartbeats: New Songs from the Minnesota AIDS Quilt Songbook" (INNOVA No. 500, 1994). William Parker is the baritone and William Huckaby is the pianist. I no longer recall where I acquired the CD, but would hope it's available for sale online (I haven't checked, though). Cheers, Steve

ogling at

1840 THACKERAY Barber Cox in Comic Almanack 33 ‘How sweetly the dear Baron rides,’ said my wife, who was always ogling at him.

But I take Steve's point, the transitive uses are for more common. On the other hand (of the one-armed man), in a poem as long as "Sexual Liberation in a Desperate Age" (and with as much "ogling"), one "ogle at," like the Homeric nod, must be allowable.

(Kudos, again, to Philip, for having rescued this Everhard from the pile of the unpublished!)

Facebook Groups is having technical difficulties

For those of you who have joined the Bookmen DC Group on Facebook, recently, you may had trouble accessing our group's page. Facebook acknowledges this problem with the following post
in their help page:

"Some people are reporting they can no longer view or access certain groups to which they belong. Please note that this is a technical issue affecting the visibility of the group, and no contet has been removed. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible."

Persistent Voices Video

Steve asked if I would post this in preparation for the September 15th meeting about Persistent Voices. It's the video footage from the recent San Francisco reading from the book, broken down by reader, and it can be found at http://vimeo.com/album/986523

Blàdé article

The Washington Blade has an article about local gay book groups and mirabile lectu we made the cut. Any readers clever enough, however, to have found their way to this site should pay careful attention to the details (particularly scheduling) on this main page sidebar.

the arc of description

(or maybe that should be "ark") is long but it bends toward the beauty of men? This is a footnote, which however given the format of blogspot will appear as a headnote, to my entry on the Holleran collection below. All his fiction, I dare say, is inspired by, if not explicitly about, the Beauty of Men. As I mentioned below, descriptions of said beauty are fewer and shorter than sunsets, sermons, seawalls, and urchins (only the first two of course, I'll replace the latter if something more appropriate occurs to me). "Joshua and Clark" is a really fun story. Holleran is Proustian not only in his reminiscence but, when he chooses to be, in his social comedy. Here follows—I will again dare say—his longest description of any man (the semi-eponymous Clark) in his entire œuvre:

… with a face that resembled that of a creature on a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He had no chin, for one thing, or at least a very recessive one. He had bad skin, for another: pitted, scarred, pockmarked. He had what appeared to be a broken nose, and small, gray eyes, and lead-gray, thinning hair that was lank and greasy-looking at the same time, combed forward over the top of his high, shiny, forehead in little Napoleonic wisps. The head itself was, furthermore, too small for his body [I'm saying nothing!], and oddly shaped. He looked prematurely aged; he looked like something in a medieval painting—the stable hand in breeches and leather jerkin slopping swill for the hogs while the prince rides past on a white horse; he looked colorless, light-starved, malnourished. He was the blade of grass that turns yellow lying under a pot. He was a creature starved for oxygen in the womb. He was a shock. When he was amused, his lips drew back to expose the gum above his uneven yellow teeth, and he laughed so hard he sprayed the air with saliva that caught the light of the jukebox at his side as he was bending over at the waist.

What to make of this … perhaps only the obvious, that it's easier to ridicule the bad than to praise the good. Anyhow, don't feel too sorry for Clark. He has a big dick. Everyone wants to sleep with him … once!