Tom of Finland

Either I experienced Duende (Federico Garcia Lorca) yesterday when I went to see  Tom of Finland  or I missed my calling (or both)!

TBLBITW 2.0

During our lively Nov. 1 discussion of The Best Little Boy in the World, the 1973 memoir by "John Reid" (Andrew Tobias), David Boxwell shared that he had read the follow-up volume Tobias published 25 years later: The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up.  David wasn't particularly impressed by either book, if memory serves, but was kind enough to lend the latter installment to me.

Now that I've finished it, I can assure those of you whom the original book's tone put off that you would find TBLBITWGU a relief.  True to his title, Tobias really did grow up (in most respects, anyway), and has the grace to acknowledge that he has rethought some of his past attitudes.  

That said, if you really couldn't stand "John Reid," you won't enjoy the company of Andrew Tobias, either.  But I did.  In fact, if he were to publish a third volume (in the tradition of Michael Apted's acclaimed series of "Up" movies) about being a gay widower in his 70s, I'd be eager to read it.

The Pug-Nosed Punk

Came across this while editing Robert's post. Not [!?] in Edmund White's bio. No idea where it comes from or when. The cutest pic of him I've ever seen!  Somehow in the back of my mind I've always had the grizzled geezer glowering o'er the page. Feel as though I owe it to Divine to sit right down at my prie-dieu and reread Our Lady of the Flowers.

RSVP

The NGA Vermeer-Genet Connection

I stopped by the National Gallery to see the Vermeer Exhibit.  The line was long and my time was limited so I went to see an exhibit called "Posing for the Camera".  Came across this photograph of Genet by Brassaï (1948).

Floating on a Sea of Letters

We've criticized (with one notable exception) anthologies that organize on the default principle of alphabetization. A review of Anne Carson's recent collection offers another view:

Float' s contents page is alphabetized, a shot across the bows of those expecting Carson to dictate its chronology; "reading can be freefall", she announces in a prefatory note. And why should collections behave like maps? Why shouldn't they — as Carson suggests — be read on shuffle?

And while we're shuffling, why not read the end of a book first, I wonder (NOT)?

A new Bookmen motto? :-)

As we finish discussing Clinton Elliott's Hidden: The Intimate Lives of Gay Men Past and Present, I wanted to share a Langston Hughes quote Elliott recounts in his entry concerning Wallace Thurman: Hughes said Thurman "had read everything and [his] critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read."

Speaking as someone who has been nitpicking Elliott's anthology quite a bit, I resemble that remark!  But I can't exactly deny its applicability, either.

Gay Anger & Erotic Ventriloquism

Off topic — and I would have missed it altogether had it not been an "Editors' Pick" (along with Russell Brand and Tennessee Whiskey) — from today's NY Times  Style  section. (And to regain our high literary ground, notice Vivek Tywary's graphic novel which we might read next year if we're not all graphiced out after Queer Graphic History.)

WARHOLCAPOTE

I went to see WARHOLCAPOTE at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.  It was good...not great.  I completely disagree with Ben Bradley's NYT review.  He says one would get lost if not an insider.  The audience loved it and gave roaring laughter at some of Capote's lines.  I find them funny but I've heard them all before, some many many times (I was not roaring with laughter).  So, it seemed to me that "not being an insider" made the play much more enjoyable.  Bradley liked Dan Butler and didn't like Stephen Spinella.  Dan Butler started out very good but lost something as the play went on.  I'm not a fan of Stephen Spinella but thought he was much better (as Warhol) than some of the things I've seen him in in New York (granted Andy Warhol was never a very illuminated personality in real life as opposed to Capote).  I kept thinking, "This will never work in New York."  But then I thought real quick, "Yes it will.  The audiences in New York are as bad as they've ever been." 

"Call Me by Your Name"

Some of you will recall that we discussed this novel by Andre Aciman in September 2008.  Our friend Ken Jost reports that a decade after its publication, the story is coming to the big screen, amid controversy that the male leads are both straight actors.

What Eagle Scouts Know

This Tuesday (October 3rd) Armistead Maupin's memoir Logical Family  will be published. Followers of this blog, however, can read an extract covering the first days of "Tales of the City" right now!

Books We'll Be Reading Next Year

FICTION
Black Deutschland  by Darryl Pinckney
A Little Life  by Hanya Yanagihara
Mundo Cruel  by Luis Negron

NON-FICTION
Queer: A Graphic History  by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele
Hold Tight Gently… by Martin Duberman
A Little Gay History… by R. Parkinson

BIOGRAPHY
The Tastemaker: Carl van Vechten… by Edward White

MEMOIR
Let’s Shut Out the World  by Kevin Bentley

DRAMA
The Laramie Project and … Ten Years Later  by Moisés Kaufman
My Night with Reg  by Kevin Elyot

POETRY
Hard Evidence  by Timothy Liu
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror  by John Ashbery
In Search of Duende  by Federico Garcia Lorca

ANTHOLOGIES
From Macho to Mariposa… by Rice-Gonzalez and Vasquez (ed)

Garth and Darryl

Garth Greenwell, whose novel What Belongs to You  we discussed last February, explains in an interview in The New Yorker  that while he was writing his novel several short stories sharing the novel's locale and some of its characters pressed themselves on him to be written. One of them, "An Evening Out," was published in the August 21 issue of the magazine. (Readers with lazy eyes can listen to the author read it. And even once you've read it you might enjoy listening to Greenwell, who reads very well.)

Readers may also be interested in James Wood's double review of Garth's book and Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland (I'm just catching up with all this). Pinckney's novel is sure to end up on our forthcoming voting list and quite possibly on our reading list as well.

R.I.P., John Ashbery

The Associated Press has just reported  that the distinguished poet, translator and critic John Ashbery—who won a trifecta of honors (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize) for his 1975 poetry collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—died on Sept. 3 at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He is survived by his husband, David Kermani. Other obituaries appear in the New York Times and The Guardian.

In his obituary, AP reporter Hillel Italie notes that Ashbery's style "ranged from ranging couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and he was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding."

One of Ashbery's most famous poems, "How to Continue," is an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and '70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS. "In a Wonderful Place," a poem from Ashbery's final collection, offers an artfully ambiguous summing up of the poet's long, distinguished career:

I spent years exhausting my good works
on the public, all for seconds
Time to shut down colored alphabets
flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It
draws like a rout. Or a treat.

R.I.P., Mark Merlis

The Washington Post reports the sad news that local gay writer Mark Merlis, two of whose novels—American Studies and An Arrow's Flight—our group has discussed, died on Aug. 15 at the age of 67 from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).

For much of his adult life, as Merlis notes on his own website, he earned his livelihood doing health care analysis for the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service and, later, as an independent consultant (experiences he drew on for his most autobiographical novel, Man about Town). But he also harbored literary ambitions that found fruition with the publication of American Studies in 1994. That novel, like the three that followed, has been widely praised for the sensitivity with which Merlis addresses such themes as the corrosive effect of shame and the intersecting paths of past and present.

The title of novelist Christopher Bram's loving tribute in the Aug. 22 Advocate, "The Books of Mark Merlis Brought Modern Gay Identity to Life," really says it all. As Bram notes, the novels "share a family resemblance: fine literary texture, a keen sense of gay history, a moral complexity worthy of Henry James, and strong sexuality. But he never repeated himself."

Bram calls Merlis' second novel, An Arrow's Flight (first published in the U.K. as Pyrrhus in 1999), his personal favorite, an assessment I heartily second. It could have been a mere "stunt, an elaborate joke: a gay retelling of the Philoctetes story set in the age of AIDS. Go-go boys mingle with Greek soldiers in ancient armor; soothsayers advise hustlers. It's wonderfully inventive and wildly funny. Yet the novel ends on a tender note that's not just moving but wise."

I'm chagrinned to admit that I had no idea Merlis had published his fourth (and, sadly, last) novel, JD: A Novel, in 2015. It's available in hardcover and on Kindle, and I've just ordered it in the latter format.  From the plot summary, it appears it explores some of the themes in American Studies, and I look forward eagerly to reading it.

London Bridges

Watching Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, one of the movies discussed in our book on gay film. Beautiful movie, quasi-documentary, his reminiscences of growing up gay in Liverpool in the early 1950s. Great line: he quotes a judge of the time who, sentencing two gay men, said: 'Not only have you committed an act of gross indecency, you have done so under one of London's most beautiful bridges!'

Having finished "In the Empire of the Air"

     Now having read all the contents of Philip Clark's edition of In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton (as I hadn't when the group met on Wednesday), my admiration is all the more. I wish/wonder if members of the group could do something to promote the reputation of this wonderful poet.
     Several people at the group meeting pointed to allusions to other poets in his work. I didn't get a chance to push in with John Berryman, alluded to by the title of 'Inner Resources' (one of the 'Four Poems', p. 43)—see Berryman 'Dream Songs 14' ('Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so / ... my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored / means you have no / Inner Resources"'—and 'Mr. Interlocutor' in 'Plusieurs jours', p. 70, recalling Berryman's invocation throughout the Dream Songs of the byplay in minstrel shows between Mr Bones and Mr Interlocutor.
     So presences of Eliot, Crane, Berryman, ?Auden ('no radio goes dead' p. 52 makes me think of Auden, 'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone', and maybe the Yeats elegy)—quite a range, and probably other poets. An imagination not circumscribed in any school, but still with its own very distinctive character; a way of writing which is, as everyone says, like John Ashbery's—but better.
     Someone (Keith? Barry?) perceptively pointed to a tactic in some poems of seeming to come up to a point but then dropping back from it—cf. 'Unattached', p. 15: 'I have / developed, then, this / leaping-back motion as a device / for getting out of the way / of these next few things as / they happen ...'
     The construction of stanzas (often of the same number of lines within a given poem) and of individual lines (mostly of about the same syllable count within a given poem, though usually not a repeated rhythm) is another whole aspect. Poetry that's both very lyrical and very formal.
     I'm grateful to Philip for bringing these poems to the group, and to the group for such an excellent, impressive discussion of them. I really do hope that Britton's work survives and becomes more widely known. Like Keats he only had a short time to write, but he should not be 'one whose name was writ in water', as Keats thought he would be.

"psychologically denatured"?

Here is the statement Donald Britton appended to his earlier published "The Winter Garden" when it appeared in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms:

Book Tar-Baby

I'm glad Steve has read all of A Little Life  and posted his reactions. It is the most controversial gay novel of our still adolescent century. Extreme positions have been taken by Garth Greenwell and Daniel Mendelsohn, each of whom has appeared in our "Books We Have Read" as will, I've no doubt, Hanya Yanagihara herself in due time. It's a big book but a quick read. Once you start you have to break away not to finish it. It's a treacly soap opera and even discontinuing it midway through I had to peek ahead several times to sate my taste for dish in this "shabby little shocker". I won't reread what I have read nor finish what I haven't but I will attend the discussion which I'm sure will be lively and divergent.

Wide Margins in the Publishing World

This perhaps should be a post about presses Harrington Park and Haworth—Routledge being a second or third marriage—but I don't have the time to redact nor the knowledge to redact from. Suffice it to say, that of all the odd books we BookMen have held in hand, Gay Travels in the Muslim World

may be the oddest yet. Donald Bathelme's early short story "Margins" presciently illuminates these "delicate sensibilities":

all-around wide margin shows a person of extremely delicate sensibilities with love of color and form, one who holds aloof from the multitude and lives in his own dream world of beauty and good taste.

OutWrite Is Coming!

Mark your calendars now for the DC Center's annual OutWrite festival, a celebration of LGBT literature, authors, writers and poets.

This year’s festival will kick off on Friday, Aug. 4, with an event in collaboration with Smut Slam DC; location and details to be announced soon!  On Saturday, August 5, there will be a full day of readings, panels, book sales, and exhibitors.  And the weekend will conclude with several writing workshops on Sunday, August 6.

This year’s keynote speaker is Cecilia Tan.  Cecilia is an author, editor and publisher at Circlet Press, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.  

Like Anal Sex?

A.L. Kennedy is supposed to have replied once to a query regarding her dense literary style: "It's like anal sex. If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening."

"A Little Life" = A Big Book!

Some of you know from our post-discussion dinners that this spring, I finally got around to tackling one of 2015's "big books"—you know, the type that generates lots of buzz among the smart set and makes the "Best Books of the Year" lists, but then languishes on coffee tables in a weird, partially read limbo until being moved to make room for the next Big Book.  (Not sure why it seems to take me two years to do that, but I had the same lag time last summer with Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.)

In this case, I speak of Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 epic, A Little Life, which I recently finished (all 720 pages!) and warmly recommend--with one major caveat.  To quote the book jacket:

As the sly references to "devotion" and "brotherly bonds" insinuate, three of the four protagonists are gay or at least bisexual, as are a good number of the secondary characters.  Yet A Little Life isn't primarily a Gay Novel—which, for me, is both its strength and its weakness.  Indeed, in some ways it was a relief to read a book that presents homosexuality as normal and healthy, without making sex the main focus.

I came to care deeply for most of these guys despite (or because of?) their manifold flaws, but that prompts my warning: Don't read this book if you're seeking uplift or reassurance!  I'm not giving anything away when I observe that Yanagihara really seems to enjoy inflicting hardships and suffering on her characters—usually, but not always, to test, or build, their mettle.

That said, there are many lyrical passages and a good deal of humor, albeit mostly in the first third of the novel.  And some characters do find happiness (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) along the way, if not necessarily where and how and with whom they had expected.

"The Master" at the Morgan

Last week I took a quick trip to the Big Apple and had the pleasure of viewing a new exhibition at the Morgan Library: "Henry James and American Painting."  If you like late 19th/early 20th-century art (and who doesn't!), the show is worth viewing in its own right, even if you aren't a big James aficionado.  It will be up through Sept. 10.

As a bonus, on June 28 I attended a joint lecture at the Morgan by Colm Toibin, author of The Master  (which we discussed way back in November 2005, and I highly recommend) and Jean Strouse, an authority on Alice James. They focused on the paintings and photographs in the show, but also explored some of the themes Toibin incorporates into that novel.

That one-two combination prompted me to dig out a book I'd purchased many years ago but never gotten around to reading: The Painter's Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James.  Compiled and edited by John L. Sweeney in 1989, this collection is out of print (alas) but widely available.  While many of James' reviews are fussy (bordering on bitchy) and precious, and/or address obscure figures and paintings, his wit and precision are ever in evidence.  Here's just one example, in which he unloads both barrels on Gérôme's "Un combat de coqs":

"The horrid little game in the center, the brassy nudity of the youth, the peculiarly sensible carnality of the young woman, the happy combination of moral and physical shamelessness, spiced with the most triumphant cleverness, conduce to an impression from which no element of interest is absent—save the good, old-fashioned sense of being pleased."

Out of Darkness, Light

On this, the first anniversary of the terrible shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub, "Prospero," The Economist's Books, Arts and Culture blog, offers a lovely tribute to the healing power of art, and the enduring qualities of queer art, in particular. An excerpt from the commentary:

"In Orlando, Everybody Is an Artist" 

The rainbow has become the branded merchandise of the modern LGBT movement, a symbol that allows anyone to pledge their support for the freedoms of others. It fulfills an important public role. But it is important that the rainbow exists alongside the art produced by LGBT people themselves, for a blunt political symbol should not drown out the authentic stories underpinning its creation.

"The World Turned Upside Down" — NOT!

Fifty years ago the British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in England and Wales … between adults (21 years or older) … in private. Gregory Woods, whose History of Gay Literature we are now reading, discusses how little was changed with the new allowance of "hugger-mugger buggery between two bodies hidden away in shame".

Selected and Rearranged

Unless one is familiar, even intimate, with a poet's production, one can have little understanding of why which poems are collected in a volume. But once they're there, any reader can, and perhaps should, speculate on why they are grouped and arranged as they are. This is something we may discuss in two days in our meeting on Mark Doty's My Alexandria. This third book of poems was his break-out collection. Fifteen years later in his eighth collection Fire to Fire in addition to new poems some poems were selected from the preceding seven. The third volume did very well. Only four poems ("Heaven," "The Wings," "To Bessie Drennan," and "Becoming a Meadow") were omitted. But the remainder were degrouped and rearranged:

   Demolition
   The Ware Collection
   Broadway
   Days of 1981

   Human Figures

   Almost Blue

   Esta Noche
   Fog
   Night Ferry
   No

   Brilliance
   With Animals
   Bill’s Story
   Chanteuse
   Difference
   The Advent Calendars
   Lament-Heaven

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this matter.

More Reasons to Go …

—as though any more were ever needed (for as the Great Cham once proclaimed: "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life…")

Be that however as it may, the Tate Britain is presenting the first exhibition dedicated to Queer British Art 1861-1967. Entry is only free for members but it runs until Sunday, October 1.

(And if anyone either before or after can tell me why Tuke's charming picture is entitled "The Critics", I'll be much obliged.)

Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty

That's the title of a big exhibit on gay history at the British Library in London this summer. It's free and continues until Tuesday, September 19. There's a whole series of talks/panel discussions in connection with this.

Sadly, this may seem like a bad moment to recommend a trip to London, and anyone thinking of going will need to make his own decision about the risks.

Jon Hamm Reads Walt Whitman's Lost Novel!

Back in February, I posted a report here that a  researcher  had turned up Walt Whitman's long-lost, never published novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.  Published anonymously, and presumably serially, in the New York Sunday Dispatch 165 years ago, only one copy survives—in the Library of Congress.  But you can read the whole thing  here.

In the Book World section of the June 4 Washington Post, Katherine Powers reports that Jon Hamm is the narrator for an audio book version that was released on May 30, the day before Whitman's 198th birthday.  Powers notes the appropriateness of that casting, given that Whitman's protagonist is an orphan with a mysterious past—and so was Don Draper, Hamm's breakout role in "Mad Men."

For Those with the Books and Wanting More

Those who go back far enough (almost fifteen years) now have occasion to recall that in the first book of poetry we read — J.D. McClatchy's Love Speaks Its Name — we read two of Mark Doty's poems: "The Death of Antinoüs" (from the earlier collection Bethlehem in Broad Daylight) and "The Embrace" (from the later Sweet Machine). The McClatchy is a nice anthology and worth owning.

More familiar perhaps because three years later (or many more months in the discussing) Timothy Liu's encyclopedic Word of Mouth had our own "Difference," "Crêpe du Chine" from Atlantis, and "Where You Are" from Sweet Machine again.

"The Rule of Themed Anthologies"

The May 28 Arts & Style section in the Washington Post (which I received a day early as a longtime subscriber) features a review of a set of essays titled In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs.  The book sounds absolutely dreadful, but I did get a kick out of the following comment by Michael Lindgren, the reviewer:

The Rule of Themed Anthologies says that one-third of such collections will be thought-provoking and insightful, one-third will be just okay, and one-third will be tossed-off words from writers too guilty or desperate to say no to the commissioning editor.

Thinking back over the many anthologies we've read during our 18 years (and counting!) as a group, I would say that rule holds up pretty well!

"More interesting as a paranoiac than as a pederast"

Those of you who were unable to join the 10 of us for last night's discussion of "The Green Bay Tree" missed a great session!

As I promised at the end of our session, here are three online reviews of the play for your reading pleasure.  The first is The Spectator  review of the April 1950 revival, from which I have taken the title of this posting.  (I suspect, by the way, that the final sentence on the page, which trails off, ends with the phrase "twentieth century," but that's merely a guess.)

The second pair of reviews, from The Guardian and The New York Times, discuss the 2014 staging that forms the basis of the edition most of us used for our discussion.  No prizes for guessing which side of the pond gave the play a more sympathetic review!

Unhinting the Cochon

The poet Hugo Williams’ step-grandfather was Mordaunt Shairp and he wrote a reminiscence of him that appeared in the TLS  of 14 May 1993. Shairp and Stepen Spender taught at the University College School in Hampstead contemporaneously. Did Spender think Shairp was gay? “Oh yes, we all assumed he was gay. We thought his getting married was something to do with your father [Hugh Williams] and that The Green Bay Tree was semi-autobiographical. I know Forster and J. R. Ackerley thought it was a gay play.” Although Hugo’s father was tutored by Shairp at the USC and soon thereafter married Hugo’s grandmother, Hugo writes “the more I think about it, the more I see the wolf under the old lady’s bonnet: the wicked sybarite was none other than my granny” (whom he describes as “a large, powerful woman in the Edwardian dowager mould”). Hugh, Shairp’s stepson, played Julian in the first production. The reminiscence concludes:

… the play’s true content was abundantly clear to contemporary audiences. “Not for years have I observed such an outbreak of horrified protestation at any play", wrote the Sunday Referee. “The association between the man and his adopted son is such as to fill normal-minded people with abhorrence”, wailed the Evening Standard. “Only Shairp’s tactful handling of a very unsavoury theme can have got this play past the censor", said The Times. Or, as James Agate put it: “perhaps one cannot expect a playwright to go the whole hog when too obvious a hint of the cochon might suppress the animal altogether.”

The TLS Historical Archive (back to 1902) has only become available today! I am unsure whether I can link to it. But for any who have access to Gale databases, the document number is EX1200470024.

RIP, William M. Hoffman

Today's Washington Post contains an obituary of William M. Hoffman (1939-2017), a prolific writer best known for his 1985 Tony-nominated play "As Is" and for his libretto for John Corigliano's 1991 opera, "The Ghosts of Versailles."

I could have sworn our group had discussed "As Is," but we haven't.  (We have discussed Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," which opened weeks after Hoffman's play.)  If memory serves, I nominated it several years ago, but it didn't garner enough support to make the reading list—but I think I'll try again. Here is a sampling of other obits:

  New York Times ,   Playbill ,   L.A. Opera ,   POZ .

Royal Beauty...

Just in case you missed the Washington Post story about it, I wanted to alert you to a very interesting title that will be released tomorrow: Kings and Queens in Their Castles by Tom Atwood.  According to the Amazon blurb: "Over 15 years, Atwood photographed more than 350 subjects at home nationwide (160 of whom appear in the book), including nearly 100 celebrities (about 60 of whom are in the book). With individuals hailing from 30 states, the book offers a window into the lives and homes of some of America's most intriguing and eccentric personalities."

Since it is a photography book, my assumption is that there wouldn't be enough text to qualify it for a Bookmen discussion.  However,  I may nominate it for our next reading list anyway, if it lives up to its promise.  Stay tuned!

Hidden...

While reading "Hidden..." I remembered (on page 64 "Rev. John Church") that I saw "Mother Clap's Molly House" at the National Theater in London in 2001.  There was this wonderful song that everyone broke into at the Molly House called "Shit on Those Who Call This Sodomy, Fabulous!"

 

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

I thought this conversation on Theater Talk was interesting when it turned to the "hysterical" Tennessee and Edwina and also the relationship between Tennessee's sexual and literary awakening.

Hadrian's "little" poem

On display before the first section is Hadrian's famous "little" poem, with odd unending ellipsis "…". I wonder how many readers realize when they finish the penultimate page of the Memoirs (page 295) that the poem has been translated and the ellipsis supplied, with Yourcenar's own thematic continuation. This poem "animula vagula blandula" is too good and too famous to be passed over so silently. I refer readers to William Fitzgerald's How to Read a Latin Poem If You Can't Read Latin Yet (or even if you can!). You can see what he has to say by clicking on the link above, next clicking on the "Look Inside" and then "Search[ing] Inside This Book" on "Epilogue", and finally clicking the second result. (Phew, I know!) But you will be able to read the entire Epilogue which is entirely about the famous "little" poem.

"Reflections on the Composition"

—the last section of Memoirs of Hadrian and I must admit, for me, the most interesting. Pages 335-338 discuss the portraits of Antinous, two of which Yourcenar singles out for special commendation. They are reproduced in the photo section after page 288. You can find better images on the web, in particular Temple of Antinous: The Gay God. I came across a side-view close up

of the Antonianos bas-relief:

I love these reliefs, bas or hauts, the emergence of forms from the sculpted material. Or in this case the submergence of Antinous, in the Nile ("as one incapable of her own distress").

Information, Please

While re-reading Margarite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, I had the feeling we had read someone's recommendation of it in one of our "Books That You Should Read, or at least, Never Have Forgotten." It was the former: Richard Canning's Fifty Gay [etc etc (see below)] Must Read. Five years ago we had discussed the 22nd essay titled "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Edmund White. I couldn't remember why he had recommended it and eagerly took up the volume to remind myself. Turned out, I hadn't forgotten what he had said about Hadrian because he said almost nothing. The essay—a good one—was about Yourcenar's life. Someone, even perhaps myself, must have noticed that at the time. And the essay is about Yourcenar's life because it was originally a review of a biography about Yourcenar that appeared in the New York Times, 17 October 1993. Canning decided to recycle the review about the life as an essay about the 22nd book which "Everybody Must Read". The essay is virtually the review, with only references to the reviewed biography deleted. Nothing untoward here, everything above-board and acknowledged. What's still puzzling is how or why Canning would include a review about the life instead of a recommendation of the book! (For those of you who have never owned the Canning or have failed to retain it, you can read the original review on the nytimes website.

This post originated out of some pique at Canning's editorial practice but I can move past that by asking if anyone knows anywhere where White did write about Yourcenar's Hadrian ?

Covering Eddy

       

 

The covers for The End of Eddy  (reading left to right, top to bottom): French, English, and (gasp) American (is this the promised end!?). The very end, lower right, is Eddy or Édouard himself. Publishers would have to be crazy (and don't we know already they are) not to use this somewhere on the cover (back, inside or outside flap). M. Louis, at 24, has already accomplished enough to have his own (and quite respectable) Wikipedia page. (No, I'm not going to provide a link. You all know how to wiki-pedia, non? )

"The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness"

This interesting essay by Michael Hobbes has just been published online in the HuffPo's new Highline series. It argues, with stories and studies, that gay men have never been more isolated! Partly that's the bedrock matter of spending time in the Closet and having to Come Out of It (or to Stay In It). Partly, however, it's about the increased fetishization of the male body and its widespread imprinting in us from our easy access to pornography. Plus, the depersonalizingly efficient hook-up apps like Grindr.

Puzzlingly absent from his discussion are his friends, his buddies, the guys you hang with when you go to the bar or wherever. Even Millenials who watched Queer As Folk know about that, at least "about" that. The public space has become vacant. Friends need to be made there, even if they can be kept in private.

Gay Travels in the Muslim World

I told Sir Edmund (my GBE) my concerns about Tangier sounding jaded in Joe Ambrose's story "Tenth Story Love Song."  His response: "Tangier is divine!  Straight teens will slow dance with you."

"The End of Eddy" by Édouard Louis …

— will be released on May 2!

"Before I had a chance to rebel against the world of my childhood, that world rebelled against me. In truth, confronting my parents, my social class, its poverty, racism and brutality came second. From early on I provoked shame and even disgust from my family and others around me. The only option I had was to get away somehow. This book is an effort to understand all that.”

The End of Eddy  has been enthusiastically received in the UK and that nearby continent. Amazon is offering a pre-order price guarantee of $23. New (cheaper!) copies of the British paperback are available through third-parties. I'm very eager to read this. Should I wait or should I buy!

Yet another Bookmen DC title in the news!

Writing in today's Washington Post, Book World Editor Ron Charles reports that Garth Greenwell is one of the finalists for the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award for What Belongs to You, which we discussed back in January.  Are we astute judges of literary talent or what?!

"Anal Resilience"

So called by Jane Ward (p. 43). Curious, I googled. Unsurprisingly the first dozen hits were hers. Unexpectedly, but still unsurprising, the next dozen—female porn stars. (Guys never get the recognition.) But sandwiched somewhere in between was this  pdf  on “The nature of piles”. Which begins:

Few who reach middle age can claim never to have had any symptoms related to the anus.

What a promising beginning. One would think it better not to continue. But the good doctor, J Alexander-Williams, does:

Thomson has shown elegantly, if not originally, that what many regard as piles are normal vascular cushions. We all have them, and they are as natural as the vascular cusions at the upper end of the alimentary tract that we call lips.

Are you still with me? Leaving nothing out:

We are prepared to accept a wide variety of lips: thick lips, pouting lips, petulant lips, wet lips, and even hot lips. Similarly, variations in the vascular cushions at the anus should possibly be regarded as signs of character rather than disease.

Now I lay me down to sleep. You’ve got the link.

Butch & Bonded

Just a word on my reading so far of the book we're discussing this Wednesday, Not Gay. I found the first chapter something of a slog (theory!). But I've just finished the second chapter and find it much more readable and entertaining. So if Chapter 1 has you mired in a Slough of Despond, skip it!

And once you make it to page 139, you will have learned that surfers are an ideal (if not, the ideal) of straight men who want to have sex with men (with straight men). The cover, even so, might still be a little hard to read. Hence, this link.

Walt Whitman, a novelist? Who knew?!

I hadn't intended to keep posting items about Walt Whitman, but this one is too good to keep to myself! A researcher has just turned up WW's long-lost, never published novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. It sounds fascinating!

You can read the whole thing here.

More 19th-century love stories for your reading pleasure (and/or pleasure reading...:-)

If the item I just posted about Walt Whitman tickled your fancy, I invite you to check out two books our group read in 2006 and 2007, respectively:
Love Stories Between Men Before Homosexuality  by Jonathan Katz and
Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century.

I found those, by the way, by scrolling down the list of "Books We Have Read" at the bottom of this blog, which the diligent Tim Walton regularly updates as our blogmaster.  If I counted correctly, we're now up to 254 titles—pretty good for slightly less than 18 years of existence!

Happy Valentine's Day from Walt Whitman!

The Metro section of today's Washington Post features a lovely story: "History's love letters provide heartfelt glimpses of the 'devoted' and 'besotted.' Among the examples cited is this one:

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman moved to Washington, where he met Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier. Whitman’s letters, including those to Doyle, were recently put online by the Library of Congress.

“They met one stormy night in 1865 when Whitman was the last passenger on Doyle’s car,” according to the Library Congress exhibit. “To Pete, the poet looked ‘like an old sea-captain.’ We were familiar at once. I put my hand on his knee — we understood from that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.”

“They said it was love at first sight,” said Barbara Bair, literature and cultural specialist. They took long walks. Whitman read Shakespeare to him. Doyle read limericks. In love letters, Whitman referred to Doyle as comrade, son and darling.

Their relationship changed, Bair said, when Whitman suffered a nearly fatal stroke while working late in the Treasury building. He moved to Camden, N.J., to live with his brother and recuperate.

In a letter dated June 20, 1877, Whitman wrote:

Dear, dear boy Pete I’m stopping here now for a week or two in the house I believe I have mentioned to you before, and where I wanted you to come and see me and still want you if you have a chance. But I spend most of my time down at an old farm down in New Jersey where I have a fine secluded wood and Creek and springs, where I pass my time alone, and yet not lonesome at all (often think of you Pete and put my arm around you and hug you up close, and give you a good buss often.)

“Your Old Walt.”

The profound portrayal of “longing” caused by the distance between the two lovers makes the letter compelling, Bair said.

now what?

For those of you unfortunates (myself included) who have finished What Belongs to You and want more, Garth Greenwell has a wonderful homepage with links to other Bulgarian stories and to anecdotes about the composition, revision, publishing etc of his novel. There are also worthwhile non-fiction pieces, such as his Buzzfeed article on "How I Fell in Love with the Beautiful Art of Cruising."

Update: Greenwell had a fairly successful career as a poet before he ventured to Bulgaria and prose. The Beloit Poetry Journal published several of his poems. "Portrait with Hood and Bindings" is particularly striking.

Bookmen DC and a "Moonlight" connection...

Last June we discussed Tarell Alvin McCraney's 2015 play, Choir Boy, which most attendees agreed was powerful and moving.  (If you weren't with us for that discussion, I encourage you to check out the book for yourself.)

This year's Oscar nominations were just announced and "Moonlight," directed and adapted by Barry Jenkins from another McCraney play (that has never been staged, alas), is up for eight Oscars, including best picture, director and supporting actor and supporting actress.  The film is still playing in area theaters, and I can't recommend it highly enough!

"Our Caribbean" is still worth a visit...:-)

We wrapped up our yearlong exploration of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Thomas Glave, editor), one of our three third-Wednesday anthologies from 2016, this past Wednesday.

I want to thank Keith Cohen for his expert facilitation of those discussions, and encourage those of you who were unable to attend those sessions to consider reading the book, or at least dipping into it.  Like most anthologies, it is uneven, both in the writing and coverage; but, on balance, I think I speak for those of us who read it when I say it was worth the time we invested.

Because the book is somewhat expensive (though used copies are available and affordable), I would be happy to lend my copy to anyone who wants to take a look before committing to a  purchase.

"Falsettos" Re-Viewed

The scene, acted with beautiful simplicity … affected me as no other in the theater this year….