BookMenDC

Night Mail (1936)

2012-01-31T17:49:00.002-05:00

"But who can bear to feel himself forgotten?" The most significant film collaboration of the Auden-Britten working partnership is, happily, up on Youtube (in various renditions). Auden's sublime doggerel kicks in about 4 minutes from the end, as does Britten's perky score, first heard over the opening credits ("Sound Direction: Cavalcanti [top billing] Auden Britten").

"massive and misleading"

2012-01-22T14:51:00.006-05:00

Googling around for some enlightenment on John Glassco's "Villanelle," I came across this sentence in a review of Seminal in Xtra!

There's a massive and misleading typo in one of the poems (John Glassco's haunting "Villanelle") …

Since some of us are professional editors and have spotted many more typos in our readings than I have, I won't even venture out on this one but offer it up to them in the spirit of good fun!

Thanks

2012-01-21T18:31:00.004-05:00

This is mainly to thank Tim for overcoming the technical problems I was having and getting me on to the blog. I'm looking forward to our discussion of The Habit of Art. I wonder if others also saw it at Studio Theater this past fall. I hope I can keep that (excellent) performance out of my head as I read, so I'm open to other possibilities.

Merrill's Ouija Board

2012-01-20T07:58:00.006-05:00

[John sent this for me to post.]

The Yale Alumni Magazine Jan/Feb 2012 issue includes a short article about Merrill’s Ouija board, which has been given to Yale’s rare book library. The article is by Langdon Hammer, professor of English at Yale and author of James Merrill: Life and Art, a forthcoming biography. Here is most of the article (I’m omitting description of the poems etc.):

… Merrill received a store-bought Ouija board as a birthday gift from a friend in 1953. As a lark, he tried the board with David Jackson, a fiction writer he had just met, and it was an immediate success. So was his relationship with Jackson, who would be his companion in daily life and on the Ouija board for the next 40 years.
For the first 20 years of their collaboration, JM and DJ—as they were known to the spirits—treated the board as a peculiar evening diversion, to be shared with friends after dinner over wine or a joint. They made their own board, to which they added numbers and punctuation, and they used a tea cup as a pointer. With this apparatus, they chatted at ease with dead friends and famous literary figures … Merrill and Jackson’s homemade Ouija board and the dime store tea cup they used as a pointer—glued together after more than one occasion when the spirits pushed it off the table in a pique—are kept in Yale’s Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. [They] were a gift to the library from J.D. McClatchy ’74PhD, adjunct professor of English at Yale, editor of The Yale Review, and one of Merrill’s two literary executors [and editors of Sandover]. With his left hand on the cup, Merrill used his right to record letters, sorting the lexical lava into words and sentences. [A few transcribed pages of this record are pictured with the article. They] are inscribed to “dearest Sandy”—McClatchy’s nickname--by DJ and JM, who call it “a page saved from the pyre.” The “pyre” refers … to Merrill’s choice to burn the Ouija transcripts he used to write Sandover. The pages shown here made it to the Beinecke, however, safe with the board and cup.

McClatchy, I find by googling, now lives in Stonington. In Merrill’s and Jackson’s house? If so, do you suppose … spooky, possums!

The issue also includes an excerpt from an account by Thornton Wilder of his time at Yale, c. 1916-20. It is to be published in February of this year in Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings, ed. McClatchy. The editors’ note with this article says Wilder “was homosexual—though never openly so, probably not even to himself.” The excerpt talks about his being an “outsider” at Yale, but there’s no reference I can see, even subliminally, to being gay.

Glassco's Villanelle - some additional thoughts

2012-01-19T02:27:00.005-05:00

The quote that I mentioned during our discussion of Villanelle is from Donne’s “The Ecstasy”:

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

After rereading Donne’s poem this evening, I think it is a very clever seduction poem. I think that Glassco’s poem may be a dialog between a body and its soul about the causes of loneliness, but not a body and soul that are two totally distinct entities. The poem asks two unanswerable questions. It would be interesting to know the context of quote, or paraphrase, from St. Augustine. I couldn’t find it even in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

"timeskip and gadabout"

2012-01-10T13:25:00.003-05:00

So Merrill, describing the narration in "Book of Ephraim"—something we commented on but nowhere near so neatly. (Yes, I'm continuing … Mirabell — it's not getting less loopy.)

Party Time Proust, or Parting Glances

2012-01-09T09:32:00.010-05:00

I've been snacking on the imperishable carcass of this beached whale, off and on, for many years. I had read the first two volumes and wondering whether it was worth the effort skipped ahead and read the last three-hundred pages … and decided it was!

All Proust, like Gaul, is divided into three parts: narration, impressions, and commentary. The commentary—echoing Flaubert on Tolstoy one might say he psychologizes—too often seems trivial, false, or incomprehensible. The impressionistic passages (I tell myself) are good for my soul. Much of the narration are parties. There are nine of them. Most of what we read was the sixth, the grand Guermantes soirée. These are for me the best part, certainly the most fun. Someone at our meeting said nothing ever happens in Proust. But something's always happening in the parties, usually somebody behaving badly. Nothing would be happening in a party if Proust sat off by himself describing his feelings of … (whatever … ) boredom—and analyzing them.

I had thought I would never read all of Recherche. I was bored with Swann's jealousy. How would I put up with two volumes of Marcello Gelosiato!? Our reading, however, has suggested to me that I may. People often talk about the best time for reading Proust being a long summer on a slow steamer to nowhere. Alternatively, nibble away, a few pages a day, somewhat à la Swann, in this long-running Gaulois. Even skip selectively through—or to—the jealousy passages, leaving the infill for later.

Our discussion, covering less than a tenth of the whole, could never be complete, could only be radically incomplete because there's so much to consider from the whole that cannot be seen in the parts until one has read (or at least read about) them all. Even if you've no wish to read Proust further, I recommend looking at Roger Shattuck's "field guide" Proust's Way. Reading about Proust for some people may be more rewarding than actually reading him!

And finally my awe of those early readers. A wit once remarked that Proust whether or not a great writer requires great readers. I wouldn't qualify as one, with my guides and synopses and indices and what not, but those first readers, venturing out onto that sea of ink, having no idea where they'd end up—whether they'd end up—simply enjoying the billow of the sail, the creak of the boards, the smell of the salt … it's humbling.

Edmund White on Proust

2012-01-06T18:13:00.009-05:00

This is an excerpt from Edmund White's essay on Proust in his new collection of essays Sacred Monsters :

"Modern readers are responsive to Proust's tireless and brilliant analyses of love because we too no longer take love for granted. Readers today are always making the personal public, the intimate political, the instinctual philosophical. Proust may have attacked love, but he did know a lot about it. Like us, he took nothing for granted. He was not on smug, cozy terms with his own experience. We read Proust because he knows so much about the links between childhood anguish and adult passion. We read Proust because, despite his intelligence, he holds reasoned evaluations in contempt, and understands that only the gnarled knowledge that suffering brings us is of any real use. We read Proust because he knows that in the terminal stage of passion we no longer love the beloved. The object of our love has been overshadowed by love itself. Proust writes:

and this malady, which Swann's love had become, had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him. As surgeons say: his love was no longer operable.

Proust may be telling us that love is a chimera, a projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly mysterious surface. But nevertheless, those fantasies are undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise, the artificial paradise of art."

Proust on Film

2012-01-05T17:15:00.004-05:00

You can go directly to track 12 on the Kino DVD of "Time Regained" (1999) for the late, great Chilean director Raul Ruiz's enactment of Marcel's accidentally-on-purpose "drop by" of Jupien's male brothel, circa 1915. Book IV's signal voyeuristic event of Marcel espying Charlus's perverse encounter with Jupien in the courtyard, is re-echoed in Book VI: only this time, Marcel rather awkwardly lugs a chair to an open transom, mounts it, and watches Charlus being flogged by one of the brothel's denizens. John Malkovich speaks French very slowly in his insinuating reedy tenor, and makes for a very seedy Charlus. In Ruiz's film we see him go to the dogs over his nasty passion for Morel (Vincent Perez), becoming a shadow of his formerly vainglorious self. Pascal Greggory is a throughly obnoxious Saint-Loup. A superb rendition of Proust's world, for those who have read the first third of Book IV, and want to know how the characters end up.

Parenthesizing Proust

2012-01-05T16:38:00.007-05:00

We talked last night about the difficulty of reading Proust, particularly his long sentences. The longest sentence in Recherche is supposed to occur in the middle of Proust's essay on "inversion." But it's merely eight semi-colons in search of a period. Proust becomes daunting when he inserts one thought within another thought within another: parenthesis, em-dash, colon etc. I challenge anyone to read and understand the following on the first trial through. (Background: Bloch has introduced Marcel to the easy women in brothels.)

So that if I owed to Bloch—for his “good tidings” that happiness and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things that we have made a meaningless sacrifice in renouncing forever—a debt of gratitude of the same kind as that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason to hope for longevity in this world and not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed into another, the houses of assignation which I frequented some years later—by furnishing me with samples of happiness, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is someting more than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the only one the that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm—deserved to be ranked by me with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparably utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, by studying other painters, hearing of other composers, visiting other cities): namely illustrated editions of the Old Masters, symphony concerts, and guidebooks to historic towns.

This Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright translation occurs in "Madam Swann at Home," the first part of Within a Budding Grove (specifically the "Revelations about love" rubric from the Synopsis). Even after having made sense of this—after performing the kind of segmentation-anaysis one is sometimes in need of with Cicero—I doubt I could read it aloud and have anyone understand it … which constitutes a pretty far mark in the lands of unreadability!

how "temps" flies …

2012-01-05T13:02:00.009-05:00

when you're reading Proust!

Happy New Year!

"displaying signs of triviality"

2011-12-08T11:07:00.004-05:00

The surface of "The Book of Ephraim" is so engaging, page by page, that we might be excused for spending most of our time last night on it. To be sure, from time to time, we'd make heroic efforts of plunging to the depths, but somehow like the unsuccessful philosopher "cheerfulness was always breaking in." There is a passage, however, from Helen Vendler's review of Divine Comedies (in which "Ephraim" first appeared) that I meant to read last night and failing to will quote now:

By taking conversation—from lovers' exchange of vows to friends' sentences in intimacy—as the highest form of human expression (in contrast to the rhapsode's hymns, the orator's harangues, or the initiate's hermetic colloquies with the divine) Merrill becomes susceptible to charges of frivolity, at least from readers with a taste only for the solemn. But this espousal of the conversational as the ultimate in linguistic achievement is a moral choice, one which locates value in the human and everyday rather than in the transcendent.

John Hurt in Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape"

2011-12-03T23:22:00.002-05:00

For the first time, this evening I went to see a play by Samuel Becket. This evening will be the last time I go to see a play by Samuel Becket. But I was glad to see John Hurt performing live on stage for 58 minutes. He is a great actor. I am including the link to the Post's review, which, unfortunately, does not mention Hurt's peeling, discarding the peelings, and eating of two bananas during the first 15 minutes of the play.

Turn Your Browser into a Ouija Board

2011-11-27T14:55:00.006-05:00

Robert Muir has found a link that may allow you to search through Polito's Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.

The Life of the Mind

2011-11-23T11:45:00.008-05:00

Robert pointed out to me—unfortunately before the discussion—this "difficult" posture on the very first page of Two People:

the [two] boys, each with an arm around the other's neck, and holding hands in the pocket of one of their coveralls….

And then here from a short story of his we read a while ago, "Servants with Torches," about a boy and man sitting close together, on a wooden bench (no backs):

after a while the boy, leaning back, spread himself out so that one of his hands was beneath [the man's] leg.

Given this difficulty of construing some of Windham's concrete descriptions, it is perhaps less surprising that his abstract ruminations can at times seem so mystifying.

More Topography

2011-11-04T11:44:00.005-04:00

Giordano Bruno was imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. "Eight years later, he was brought out one morning and burned alive in the Campo dei Fiori."

how does a man spend eight years finding new ways to present the same viewpoint, to develop the same argument?

This is the question (p. 70) Forrest wants to investigate in the Vatican Archives. It is a question which could be asked about Forrest himself, who has been married eight years. He has a significantly "squishy" experience following the voice of an unseen youth as he nears the place of Bruno's execution (p. 9). And coincidence of coincidences (and not unappreciated by Forrest) Marcello … lives on the Via Giordano Bruno.

There may be more to Windham's list of bus stops than meets the eye.

(Curiously, for all the specified places in Two People, we never learn exactly where Forrest lives, do we? Somewhere near the Spanish Steps, of course, but above them? below? … )

Windham and sex talk

2011-11-03T22:03:00.004-04:00

I was thinking about our discussion last night and specifically about the lack of direct talk about sex in "Two People." In "Last Exit to Brooklyn" Hubert Selby Jr. certainly uses frank language about sex (including homosexuality). That book is from the same period and was a success. So, why is it okay for Selby to use it and not Windham? Is it the violence factor in Selby's novel that makes it acceptable to the reading public of the 1960's? Just thought I would throw that out there.

Fontana delle Tartarughe

2011-11-01T13:12:00.008-04:00

This fountain appears in Donald Windham's Two People. As there, on my first visit to Rome I happened upon it, knowing nothing about it — a wonderful surprise! I can't remember whether it was then that I fell in love with Rome, but it could not have been afterwards.

P.S. At our discussion some one remarked on how little description of places in Rome there is in this novel whose spine seems to consists of an interleaving list of Roman bus stops. One exception certainly is this fountain, which is described first when Marcello passes by it on his way to school and then near the end when Forrest comes upon it with "wild surmise".

Lezama Lima's "Paradiso"

2011-10-26T21:29:00.004-04:00

Well...finishing Jose Lezama Lima's "Paradiso" is, by far, the hardest read I have ever accomplished. Lezama Lima had to be the most educated man that I have ever come across. The references to ancient Greece, the Romans, French literature of every period, obscure music past but great contemporary composers (of his time) like Bartok and great works of art are mind-numbing. There are chapters that are like Plato's "Symposium." And when I thought I had surpassed all my inadequacies, he hits me w/ the last 3 chapters. I need somebody to explain them to me. But I did it and I'm very excited. What a work-out! Can't wait till the essay in "50 Books..." comes up in discussion.

Dishing Gertrude Stein

2011-10-23T09:55:00.004-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a long article in this morning’s Washington Post, reviewing the exhibition “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five stories” at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery until January 22. We discussed “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” at our 4/30/2002 meeting. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have occasionally perused some of her other writings collected in The Library of America edition of her selected works, some of which are enjoyable to read but often baffling.

As an author, she wrote reams of gibberish, either in a singsong style that one critic aptly described as “literary baby talk” or in a hermetically sealed private language that she absurdly considered an analog of cubism. As an art collector, she often showed remarkably bad taste, especially after the early years of her alliance with Picasso. Her theater work, either unintelligible or profoundly cliched, survives because other people set it to music or choreographed it. Even her moral reputation — courageously living with her female partner, Alice B. Toklas, championing a woman’s right to be eccentric — has been sullied by recent scholarship showing that she while she rode out World War II in a French country house, she was protected by a particularly unsavory and anti-Semitic official of the collaborationist Vichy government

La Clef de "Caracole"

2011-10-08T19:51:00.006-04:00

Robert and I have put our heads together and have, with an authoritative assist, come up with a who's who:


  Gabriel      Keith Fleming (White's nephew)
  Angelica     his girlfriend at the time
  Mateo        Edmund White / Richard Howard
  Mathilde     Susan Sontag
  Edwige       Keith McDermott (White's boyfriend at the time)
  Constantine  David Del Tredici
  Daniel       David Rieff
  Walter       Richard Sennett
  Claude       David's girlfriend at the time.

The Man Who Became A Woman

2011-10-08T12:46:00.010-04:00

The Ex found a copy of Eight Great American Short Novels in the throw-away pile of books in the town dump while I was visiting him this summer. He picked it up for me because it included Sherwood Anderson's "The Man Who Became A Woman" (Exes—don't you just love them!). I'd never heard of it though I'd certainly heard of him (Winesburg, Ohio) and we've all, even we all in this book club, have read his short story "Hands". "TMWBAW" which I think of rather as a long short story than as a novella, was originally published in Anderson's short-story collection Horses and Men (1923), "originally" as in it first appeared in that book—it had never been published in any magazine before! I more than dutifully read it and had been wondering how to mention it to readers of this blog when I came across an interview of James Purdy in Conjunctions (Fall, 1982). I'll let him do the describing:

PURDY: … Anderson wrote a wonderful story called “The Man Who Became a Woman”: one of the most amazing stories ever written. I don’t know whether he knew how startling it is. It’s about a young boy who is a groom in the stables, he takes care of horses. The story is really a problem of crisis of sexual identification, to use a pretentious psychological phrase. Suddenly, working around these awful, rough men, and being just a young boy who simply loved to curry the horses, suddenly one night he wanders into a saloon and he looks into the mirror and instead of seeing himself he sees a young woman. Horrified, he runs back to the stables. There these Negro … [spoiler deleted] … but there is no real closing to the story: Anderson shows such deep insight into the terror of adolescence in this story.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds to me like a James Purdy story.
PURDY: Yes, it does! It’s the only story by Anderson where I think he really plumbed the depths.

Definitely a must-read! We could pair it with something else on a short night or even give the whole hour over to it alone. Unfortunately, it seems never to have been widely anthologized, and the only book I've been able to find it in (other than the two already mentioned) is the Sherwood Anderson short story collection Certain Things Last. All three are out-of-print. No copy of the story seems to be up on the internet. But there may be cause for hope. Anderson died in 1941 and if his copyright expires in 70 years, it may soon appear. I'll keep you posted (and please, vice versa)!

Les Rêves dangereuses

2011-10-06T11:53:00.007-04:00

Some people from last night will undoubtedly enjoy this little tidbit from Edmund White's City Boy (p. 88):

After reading my novel Caracole he [James Merrill] voiced my worst fears, saying "That first chapter, my dear!" and rolling his eyes.

I wonder whether that was in manuscript or publication, and if the former, what changes White made, if any.

A much longer passage from My Lives (p. 212) is worth quoting in full but I'll restrict myself to:

I told someone the book was as if a student was studying world literature and modern European history and fell asleep on the night before the final and dreamed a long, nasty dream.

In Your DreamS

2011-10-06T09:49:00.008-04:00

Thanks to David for pointing out the Library of Congress' wishful cataloging of Edmund White's Caracole:

1. Teenage boys—Psychology—Fiction

Gabriel, arguably, is the main character, but who is the other boy? Perhaps the LOC cataloguer was beguiled—as who of us hasn't been—by Herbert List's wonderful cover photo:

We Were Here

2011-09-21T22:18:00.004-04:00

There is a new AIDS documentary opening at the West End Cinema on October 28 called "We Were Here." The review was quite interesting.

The Desert and Solitude

2011-09-03T20:17:00.006-04:00

Edmund White writes about Paul Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky and its potential influence on his own novel The Married Man in this year's July 14 issue of the New York Review of Books.

Alex Ross on Dorian Gray

2011-08-15T10:10:00.004-04:00

Alex Ross has a thoughtful piece in the August 8 issue of the New Yorker that examines the new uncensored edition of Dorian Gray published by Harvard University Press. He makes the point that the earlier version submitted to Lippincott's Magazine was shorter and spelled out in more obvious language than ever the nature of homosexual desire. He opines that Wilde was more of a gay liberationist than has been credited. When the novel was published in England, it was filled out and scenes depicting contacts between men were excised. The original Lippincott manuscript is in the Morgan Library, New York, and shows that it suffered cuts even by the American publisher.

The Sumner of Our Discontent

2011-08-12T08:35:00.006-04:00

The rumors we've been hearing have proved to be true. Thanks to Steve for noticing this story in the Post. (I wonder if we can disguise ourselves as a nine-foot concert Steinway.) Please keep your eyes out for new meeting places!

eine kleine research project

2011-08-10T07:23:00.005-04:00


apophallation: eating dick, literally … as in, off!

 apofellatio : getting off task, losing focus, 

               particularly near the finish

One of these is a real word, the other ought to be. You go figure. I could give you links—I could even post videos—but reverting to the generally high(er) tone of this blog's entries, I'll refrain. ("Desist" might be the more appropriate term given recent uproar, but I'm not taking down the Tiny Alice hyena video!)

"Brokeback Mountain" discussion

2011-08-09T20:12:00.002-04:00

Independent Publishers

2011-08-08T22:07:00.001-04:00

At last week’s OutWrite event, there was discussion regarding the current state of independent publishers competing against the large, integrated media companies. These small presses survive when people buy the books and periodicals that they publish. I would like to recommend one, Assaracus, a quarterly journal of gay poetry published by Sibling Rivalry Press. I bought a copy of issue 3 on the recommendation of Philip CIark, who wrote one of the poems in the section called “Poems Inspired by James Franco”.

At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the title of the periodical, assuming it had something to do with “Ass”. I didn’t totally trust the Wiki result when I finally decided to google Assaracus, and so I consulted my other sources (references available upon request). Turns out that “Assaracus” is also the name of a descendant of Zeus, via Dardanus, Erichthonius, and Tros. Assaracus was one of the sons of Tros. Ganymede was his brother. Ganymede was, of course, without issue, but Assaracus was the grandfather of Anchises, who was the father of Aeneas. Aeneas relates this noble lineage to Achilles on the battlefield in a memorable passage in book 20 of the Iliad. I’m glad that the publisher decided not to call the periodical “Ganymede”. That would have been too easy. I ordered a one year subscription.

"The Pleasures of Rimbaud" by Charles Rosen in NYRB

2011-08-05T23:49:00.001-04:00

Reviewing:

Illuminations
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated from the French and with a preface by John Ashbery
Norton, 175 pp., $24.95

Poems Under Saturn
by Paul Verlaine, translated from the French and with an introduction by Karl Kirchwey
Princeton University Press, 154 pp., $39.50; $15.95 (paper)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/pleasures-rimbaud/

We got a sentence in this Blade Article about the OutWrite LGBT Book Fair

2011-08-04T23:06:00.001-04:00

“At 3 p.m., BookMen D.C. will host a discussion of the high-spirited erotic adventure, “Caracole” by Edmund White.”

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/08/04/pink-pages/

Mercy Me, or The Cardinal's Hyena

2011-08-01T18:39:00.004-04:00

I'll never suspicion Albee again!

"Reverting to a Wild State"

2011-08-01T18:03:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Ken for pointing out this story in the latest New Yorker (August 1, 2011). Author Justin Torres's first novel, We the Animals, is going to be published at the end of this month. I have come to cast jaundiced eyes on coming of age stories, but "Reverting to a Wild State" is so well done I'm ready to blink twice. It's a very short story (the novel is similarly brief) so please read it first before going on, if you wish, to Willing Davidson's interview in The New Yorker Online. A bonus is a snapshot of the cute young author. (I wonder how many others will find a resemblance to Autumn Whitehurst's illustration↑.)

White, Ashbery, Rimbaud and Verlaine

2011-07-30T10:33:00.002-04:00

Earlier this year we discussed Edmund White's memoir City Boy. Next week (see sidebar) we'll be discussing his novel Caracole. This month Terry's post discussed White's short biography of Arthur Rimbaud, and last month Tom posted a translation of Rimbaud's poem "After the Flood" by John Ashbery. Now interested readers can see White's review of Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Illluminations in the July 22, 2011 issue of the TLS (Times Literary Supplement).

White on Rimbaud

2011-07-14T10:27:00.003-04:00

I finished reading Edmund White's short biography of Rimbaud (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008) while on a break in Cape Cod and found it worthy if dry. Rimbaud is an intriguing biographical subject because he is so obscure and obscurist -- for three or four years, plenty of intimate details and drama, then years without any information at all. A sudden burst of brilliance and then absolute silence except for nagging letters back home to his cold and abrupt (fed up?) mother during his ten-year period in Abyssinia. He was niggardly and friendless. I think White loved his rebelliousness and outrage and yet it seems to have been directed for naught. In the end, I felt White was distant and cool toward Rimbaud, perhaps unsympathetic. But then how could anyone have been? Yet he is considered the founder of modern French poetry.

Just Say No

2011-07-13T22:08:00.004-04:00

I'm not in favor of reading too much by any one author—there are so many we haven't read at all!—and we've read three already by Alan Hollinghurst. So, although I think The Swimming Pool Library is one of the two great gay novels and I will be sure to read his latest novel, The Stranger's Child, I quote the end of The Economist 's recent review to e x c i t e early opposition against it:

It is all beautifully controlled and mordantly funny, but devoid of warmth—a lot like the gilded, heartless people he is writing about.

a great darkening presence

2011-07-13T11:35:00.005-04:00

What some of us missed in the acting edition and others informed us of from their reading edition:

(A great shadow, or darkening, fills the stage; it is the shadow of a great presence filling the room …

This stage direction continues for several more lines. A few more lines in both editions from Julian, and then a concluding stage direction that is ampler in the reading edition. Both editions are copyrighted 2001!

This discrepancy remains for me the greatest mystery involved in Tiny Alice. Even the hyena and the anus trail behind.

After our very good discussion of this play—I'm always amazed at how much more we uncover together—I re-read the third act. It's much more readable in the reading edition (of course) and I can appreciate better the themes others were talking about, but my opinion of the play as a whole remains unchanged. And I have to wonder how compelling even its fans find Julian's final speech—long(ish) and rambling (or so it seems to me … with no better memory from Gielgud's delivery forty-seven years ago).

I must confess, however, without having to look too deep into my own soul, that the topic of martyrs and martyrdom hold absolutely no interest for me ... more particularly the wish to be a martyr. Jesus didn't! (And let no one think the motes in his eyes will be any the safer after the parading of this beam in mine.)

"tiny alice"

2011-07-07T11:48:00.002-04:00

—nothing in Wayne Dyne's Homolexis. I tried to consult Bruce Rodgers' The Queen's Vernacular but my copy, in some fit of tidiness, seems to have been deaccessioned. The earliest reference I have found to a special meaning of "tiny alice" is in Morris Belsnick's letter of April 8, 1965, to The New York Review of Books, which begins

Philip Roth is correct about the underlying intentions of Tiny Alice, but why does he write as though it were a dirty little secret which Albee cannot face? The very title of the play itself is, within homosexual circles, a phrase for a masculine derrière.

Belsnick's letter is in response to Philip Roth's embarrassing review, "The Play that Dare Not Speak Its Name," published in the February 8, 1954 issue.

The disaster of the play, however—its tediousness, its pretentiousness, its galling sophistication, its gratuitous and easy symbolizing, its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee—all of this can be traced to his own unwillingness or inability to put its real subject at the center of the action.

… which is of course homosexuality. A whole book, I am coming to believe, can be written about Homophobia v. Edward Albee, a substantial chapter of which would be centered on Tiny Alice. It's hard for people who didn't live through it to appreciate what a time of fearful orthodoxy the Fifties and Sixties were. People—readers, playgoers, moviegoers, critics, columnists etc—went crazy if they were presented with an experience without clear meaning. Behind much of that anxiety of intention lay the love that dare not speak its name, which is to say, the love that people dared not hear.

By the way, if you consult urbandictionary.com on "tiny alice" you will see that a thumbs up has been added to the previously reported three thumbs down. Pile on and vote! I've decided this one's a keeper. The biggest laugh in the gay male porn industry is how tops go on about loving a "tight ass" even though it's clear from their performance that many of them would benefit from an anus that's rather looser.

Homosexual Strains

2011-07-05T13:14:00.010-04:00

There is, moreover, a homosexual strain running through Tiny Alice, but remaining just barely supraliminal …

So John Simon in The Hudson Review of the time. He mentions the lawyer-butler relationship, the lawyer-cardinal relationship, and a "suggestive waspishness that characterizes many homosexual relationships."

Is all this relevant to the main theme or not? Or is it, perhaps, the main theme? Is the whole play a piece of camp metaphysics or metaphysical camping?

Martin Gottfried writing for Women's Wear Daily was even more … waspish:

… Albee, once more blaming vicious womankind for murdering the tendereness of men [which] in this case is equated with homosexuality [which] the play is all about without once actually alluding to it.

All this, incidentally, a full year before Stanley Kauffmann's infamous "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises" in The New York Times. (Malcolm had closed a few weeks earlier after Kauffmann's thumbs-down review a few weeks before that.)

What we have here...

2011-06-25T06:56:00.002-04:00

As most of you know, I send reminders of upcoming Bookmen meetings and other news from work (honley@afsa.org) because it's usually easier to maintain and manage a large list of addresses. However, ever since we upgraded our computer system earlier this month, a lot of messages have started bouncing back, particularly from AOL addresses. (Not sure whether the problem is at our end, AOL's or the interface.) Until that gets resolved, whenever I receive an error message I'll resend the e-mail from home. Apologies in advance for any duplication, but I'd rather you get info twice than not at all.

If you ever go more than a couple of weeks without getting at least one e-mail from me (the longest I've ever gone without sending something), chances are it's because of this glitch. But even then, you can always find info on upcoming meetings (what we're discussing, when and where) here on the Web site, and can also send me an e-mail by clicking on the link.

Thanks for your patience; hope to see many of you at a meeting soon! Cheers, Steve

Rimbaud's After the Flood, translated by John Ashbury

2011-06-18T14:06:00.001-04:00

This is from the June 23 edition of NYRB.

No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure,

Than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.

Oh the precious stones that were hiding,—the flowers that were already peeking out.

Stalls were erected in the dirty main street, and boats were towed toward the sea, which rose in layers above as in old engravings.

Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house,—in the slaughterhouses,—in the amphitheaters, where God’s seal turned the windows livid. Blood and milk flowed.

The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses.

In the vast, still-streaming house of windows, children in mourning looked at marvelous pictures.

A door slammed, and on the village square, the child waved his arms, understood by vanes and weathercocks everywhere, in the dazzling shower.

Madame xxx established a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the cathedral’s hundred thousand altars.

The caravans left. And the Splendide Hotel was built amid the tangled heap of ice floes and the polar night.

Since then the Moon has heard jackals cheeping in thyme deserts,—and eclogues in wooden shoes grumbling in the orchard. Then, in the budding purple forest, Eucharis told me that spring had come.

—Well up, pond,—Foam, roll on the bridge and above the woods;—black cloths and organs,—lightning and thunder,—rise and roll;—Waters and sorrows, rise and revive the Floods.

For since they subsided,—oh the precious stones shoveled under, and the full-blown flowers!—so boring! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her coals in the clay pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know.

reverberations

2011-06-12T15:08:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Terry for pointing out this article in the Observer about Alan Hollinghurst, occasioned by the publication of his fifth novel The Stranger's Child. The following paragraph is so pertinent to the three dicussions we've had about him that I quote it in full:

The other criticism expressed about Hollinghurst's writing is that it lacks warmth, that his characters are essentially unsympathetic, even unlikable. It's a judgment that serves to reduce the novel to a personality contest. What might be fairer to say is that Hollinghurst does not conceal the less appealing human qualities – vanity, selfishness, jealousy – and nor does he seek to delineate his characters according to their distribution. "I don't make moral judgments," he has said. "I prefer to let things reverberate with their own ironies and implications."

Is there a good story with a worse ending …

2011-06-05T19:55:00.006-04:00

than "Paul's Case"? There are three failings. First, moral. Cather presents a young man of very limited means (not only financial!) and opportunities who manages to live, however briefly, the life he wishes, and even to end it on his own terms. Though Cather is sympathetic enough to create this portrayal, she loses her nerve at the end and feels compelled to condemn:

When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.

Oh yes, the vastness of yellow wallpaper and decades of rearing narrow-eyed no-neck monsters (after the distasteful drudgery of each individual conception). Paul's experience in Manhattan has shown him that the life he wants to lead can be had only with money. What sudden epiphany has occurred to him, in mid-drop, to convince him otherwise!? Our narrator abandons her creature with less care than he buried his red carnation. It's not enough he die ... he must despair and die (R3, V, iii, 128).

The next two failings are aesthetic. Part of Cather's success in this story is presenting it as a case study, introducing the latest medicinal pathologizing of homosexuality in describing a person of Paul's "temperament". She shatters that picture-making mechanism when she jumps into his mind for the last seconds of his consciousness (she, who wasn't even sure—"perhaps"—that her subject had looked into the dark corner). This failure of course is more generally one of inconsistent authorial point-of-view, but more acute here because of her adopted "case study" narrative.

The third failing is also aesthetic and embarrassingly bald.

Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

—"the immense design of things"? Oh Willa, give this ember burning in your tea-pot tempest a break! Where did she find that tail to pin on the donkey!? There's been no "design of things" in evidence, immense or minute, explicit or implicit, in this aborted case study. Cather has pulled out all stops and hoped to leave us on a swell.

“Paul’s Case” was originally published in Cather’s first short-story collection The Troll Garden, a few months before its appearance in McClure’s. For reasons of the merest editorial convenience a page-worth of material was omitted from the magazine. Out of respect for both her and for her character, I will read the story's end as

When the right moment came, he jumped. He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, immeasurably far and fast … and that his limbs were gently relaxed.

Is Paul Gay?

2011-06-03T15:54:00.006-04:00

Philip gave very good arguments for why a historically informed reading would answer in the affirmative. More naively I wondered whether Paul's "shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look" (sixth paragraph after his escape to New York) might not be his homosexuality. Some handwaving at the time, about Freud (whom Cather would have had to have been very au courant in 1904 to have even heard of) seemed to place that off the table. But looking over "Paul's Case" again—I find it endlessly re-readable, the details are so apt—I notice on the next-to-the-last page, when Paul is planning his suicide, this passage:

Yet somehow he was not afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps he had looked into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been.

Now the thing in the dark corner might be anything I suppose, but I can only think of homosexuality. If no one can offer anything else, our answer to the opening question has to be, once again, in the affirmative.

Reading Hart

2011-05-28T11:33:00.010-04:00

No one who read The Bridge with us a year ago will be surprised by the linguistic difficulty of Hart Crane's "Voyages". Crane was early and notoriously difficult. In a public letter to Harriet Monroe that was published in the October, 1926 issue of Poetry together with his poem "At Melville's Tomb", he answered some of her earlier editorial queries about his language.

You ask me how a portent can possibly be wound in a shell … I ask you how Blake could possibly say that "a sigh is a sword of an Angel King." You ask me how compass, quadrant and sextant "contrive" tides. I ask you how Eliot can possibly believe that "Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum!"

What distinguishes Crane's practice and make his reading so hard (and so poetic) is that he usually dispenses with the subject of the metaphor (the "tenor") and simply launches us off into the associated image or idea (the "vehicle"). So whether a street lamp is ever like a drum or a sigh like a sword we know what drums and swords are being compared to. In Crane we get portents "wound in corridors of shells" and and compasses, quadrants and sextants "contrive[ing] no farther tides." Good luck guessing what those portents and compasses are comparisons of!

In his "General Aims and Theories" (unpublished in his lifetime) Crane explicates the "dynamics of inferential mention" in his "logic of metaphors":

[W]hen, in "Voyages" (II), I speak of "adagios of islands," the reference is to the motion of a boat through islands clustered thickly, the rhythm of the motions, etc.

—something I doubt would have ever occurred to me unaided. And I'm still in some need to understand how this leisurely sailing-by can "complete the dark confessions [which ocean's] veins spell." So this post is a plea for everyone to put on his free-association caps. I'm not suggesting that any reading could be right but conceivably a large number of readings might not be wrong.

Fortunately what makes "Voyages" more accessible than The Bridge, aside from its length, is its clear and familiar theme, that of a love affair, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The homosexuality of that love affair is far from incidental and makes the sequence that much more interesting, even vital, to us. It is arguably the greatest poem on that theme. The middle, I must confess—the crisis and turning point of that affair—, remains something of a muddle to me and I look forward to the insights other readers may bring. I'm unsure even how to parse the first three lines of the fourth stanza. I'd hate to have to diagram them (much more discover their tenors or divine their meaning). I'll let them conclude this post:

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings

Soe

2011-05-16T09:43:00.003-04:00

Soe: it means the place of man
in the line from earth to heaven;

—no idea where this comes from. You who do please enlighten us now or at Wednesday meeting.

Caracole

2011-05-15T19:27:00.005-04:00

This novel has been on my bookshelf since it was first published in 1985. It's something of a roman à clef for Susan Sontag and her Mannahatta gang. City Boy writes about them directly and refers to its writing, publishing, and scandalous aftermath. Having enjoyed this portrayal of Sontag et al., I was impelled at last to take up the novel.

White himself earlier describes it in My Lives:

I'd written a difficult novel, Caracole, in which none of the characters happened to be gay. ... I thought it would be amusing to show a race of vain heterosexuals on the permanent make and to set the action in a place that blended eighteenth-century Venice, occupied Paris and contemporary New York.

Three years earlier White's breakthrough gay novel, A Boy's Own Story, was published. Part of the later book's scandalous aftermath was caused by the "race of vain heterosexuals" depicted, who disliked Caracole because White hadn't stayed in the ghetto and stuck to writing about gays. Homosexuals too disliked it because he hadn't stayed in the ghetto and stuck to writing about gays. Neil Bartlett, however, in an early defense argued that Caracole was the ultimate gay novel because it treated everyone as though they were gay!

With hindsight it can now be reread and seen as a landmark, reclaiming a whole prehistory of high camp narratives in which a gay voice rewrites straight lives and in so doing undoes the world.

I'm guessing it's White's best novel (having read many but not all). I'm eager to read it again with the group and hear what everyone else thinks.

Upgrading Bookmen DC Facebook Group -- Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format

2011-05-06T23:35:00.001-04:00

This evening, I upgraded the Bookmen DC Facebook Group.

Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. We must upgrade if we would like to continue using this group, which makes it easier for members to connect and share.

Visit the link below for more information about the new Facebook Groups

https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/groups

World Doctors Orchestra for Whitman-Walker

2011-05-02T22:22:00.008-04:00

My doctor plays for the World Doctors Orchestra.

Their next concert is Sunday, September 11th 2011, 7 p.m., at
The Music Center at Strathmore, Bethesda, MD. Program:

Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection”

—under the baton of Stefan Willich with soloists: Tamaki Kawakubo, Violin; Jeanine De Bique, soprano; and Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano.

The proceeds of the concert will support the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington. The Clinic serves Washington’s diverse urban community, including individuals who face barriers to accessing care. It has special expertise in providing care for patients with HIV/AIDS.

"Book Buff" Paul Cadmus Painting

2011-05-02T22:12:00.003-04:00

The "Book Buff" Paul Cadmus Painting that Tim posted on the BookMenDC Blog is now the logo on the Bookmen DC Group on Facebook.

"Book Buff "

2011-05-02T13:24:00.004-04:00

Richard has suggested we might use this Paul Cadmus painting as our logo

—but modesty prevents me from using such an image of my glory days.

Stonewall Uprising

2011-04-26T18:11:00.003-04:00

I hope I'm nobody's point person on media alerts. Last night PBS broadcast an episode of American Experience titled "Stonewall Uprising". Aside from generic interest, this eighty-minute documentary is based on one of the books we read (by David Carter, see below). You can watch it on the linked website or tomorrow morning (4/27) from 1:30 am to 3 am on WETA, Channel 26.

from "Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint"

2011-04-15T21:59:00.004-04:00

…

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

…

never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

—Federico García Lorca

Author's Guild v. Google

2011-04-15T06:48:00.002-04:00

The author of the New York Review of Books article ("Google's Loss: The Public's Gain") proposes a Digital Public Library, free to all. I have been following with great interest the proposed google settlement, which would have given it a monopoly over the millions of "orphan" books (unknown or unclaimed copyright holders). Quoting the judge, "the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission…” Here is the judge’s full decision.

Bookmen DC Facebook Group

2011-04-13T22:42:00.001-04:00

Because of text limitations in Facebook wall postings, going forward, I am going to add BookMenDC Blog postings in separate topics on the Discussion board. I will continue to post the epistles from our facilitator to the Bookmen DC Wall on Facebook, but will edit them if he exceeds the text limitations.

Everyone should feel free to post on the wall.

Thanks,

Tom

(He kneels beside her

2011-04-08T20:01:00.006-04:00

and his fingers find the opening of her blouse.)

Someone at our discussion of A Streetcar Named Desire mentioned this stage direction in Stanley's last line of the play as evidence of his inherently bestial even depraved nature, thinking that he could evanesce Stella's grief by arousing her (shutting off the waterworks above, so to say, by putting those below in flow). Incredible as this seems for any character we may have seen on the stage it certainly is in keeping with Williams' original view of the "gaudy seed-bearer's" effect of "narcotized tranquility" on his ex-Belle Reve wife. This stage direction is in the play's first edition (published less than three weeks after its premiere) as well as in the second edition three years later (and incorporating for the first time changes in the script that had come about in that production). In the next year (1951) the film appeared and two years after that the Dramatists Play Service published an acting edition, which has some changes in the dialogue but many more in the stage directions. One of those changes is this stage direction — deleted!

All of which makes wonder what Marlon Brando did in the film. Anyone remember? Please let us know or look for it in the future. Brando himself was a very sensitive man and brought that sensitivity, with memorable effect, to the various low-life or out-law characters he portrayed. Elia Kazan, director of both the original production and the film, feared that the play was becoming "the Marlon Brando show ... What would I say to [him]? Be less good?" Brando himself thought that both he and Jessica Tandy had been miscast. And of course, as I mentioned in our discussion, Harold Clurman famously criticized Kazan for tilting the audience's sympathy away from Blanche and onto Stanley. The film—and this is a delayed and very roundabout response to Terry's earlier post—is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it records this truly phenomenal performance (his best on film—one of the best on film), and a curse in that it perpetuates a performance so at odds with the play. Brando was only offered the role after Jack Garfield and Burt Lancaster refused it (the former "because he felt Blanche [!] dominated the play"). How much safer they would have been, as well as his understudy Jack Palance. The first national tour was directed by Harold Clurman with Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn. That must have been definitive!

Bernard de Zogheb and Edmund White

2011-04-07T11:27:00.003-04:00

There's a short reference to de Zogheb in City Boy (p. 129, paperback edition) whom White met at James Merrill's house. He is described as "an Egyptian" who once acted as a "tourist guide." On both counts de Zogheb might have blanched, since he liked to call himself a "Levantine"—the family came from Syria (Lebanon) in the 19th century to make their fortunes and acquired a title from the pope in the course of that century, and then formed as part of the creme de la creme of Alexandrian society for the few short decades that the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria lasted—and he might have acted as a tour guide in moments of desperation but he is known as a librettist and artist. De Zogheb had a brilliant personality, was profoundly witty, and had a way with the four or five languages that flourished in the city during these decades. He wrote librettos for operas, some of which were published with introductions by James Merrill (and now very expensive): "Le Sorelle Bronte" was one; "Phaedra" was another (mentioned in White's book). His death in 1999 was a sad event because it marked the end of the cosmopolitan period in Alexandrian history. A nice obituary was published in Al-Ahram Weekly, which gives some of the flavor of the man. A study of "Literary Alexandria" by John Rodenbeck, an emeritus professor of English at the American University in Cairo and a friend of mine, was published by the Massachusetts Review, the last four pages of the article are somewhat devoted to de Zogheb.

The Prissy Closet

2011-04-03T20:09:00.006-04:00

An interesting theme that runs through Edmund White's City Boy is his passage from the eternal and universal to the contemporary and particular, both as a reader and a writer. In his twenties he "still had an unquestioning admiration for the Great … because they were Great." As a writer, "I defended myself against … immersing myself in my own period. … A writer must be eternal and universal." With an artist's instinct he moves against his prejudices. But later, when successful, he has to put up with such fulminations as Richard Poirier's (slant rhymes with "warrior"):

Gay writers! I've never heard of anything so absurd. It's obscene! … it's a betrayal of every humane idea of literature. Have you never heard of universalism?

To answer his ilk in kind: "yeah, that dago guttersnipe, writing in the vernacular — Dante!"

The NY Times obituary of the "warrior" concludes

Mr. Poirier never married. No immediate family members survive.

A Confederacy of Dunces: Some Useful Links

2011-03-31T17:45:00.006-04:00

Greetings, Colleagues—

I encourage all of you to (re)read John Kennedy Toole's rollicking novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Here is an extract from the Introduction to Joel Fletcher's recent book Ken & Thelma.

According to Wikipedia Thelma Toole is described as educated and "highly cultured" (unlike Irene Reilly), but quite controlling. Toole's father, Ken, was less of a force in his son's life, but hardly absent, either (unlike the barely mentioned Mr. Reilly, he of the "weak seed").

Note, too, that Ignatius is apparently based in good part on his former professor, Bob Byrne, but jumps off as well from Toole's own experiences (e.g., short-lived jobs in a men's clothing factory and vending tamales).

Finally, some pix. (And thanks to Glenn for all these links!)

Cheers, Steve

tu barda llena de mariposas

2011-03-20T20:14:00.005-04:00

"Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies."

Lorca...

Albee

2011-03-13T19:35:00.004-04:00

Probably don't need to point out to anyone Randy Shulman's good interview with Edward Albee in the latest MetroWeekly, occasioned by Arena's current and continuing Albee Fest, most of which is free (?) and at least some of which some of us are going to. This raises the question of what we might read by him (having read nothing). Malcolm—both Purdy's novella and Albee's adaptation—seems an obvious choice, except that the Purdy I think is o.o.p. Of course, anything by Albee is arguably a candidate (ex persona, as it were). At Home at the Zoo—old "Zoo Story" with its new prequel "Home Life"—might be a good recommendation. Others?

blast from the past

2011-03-13T08:55:00.003-04:00

This was the cover of a CD that another book club member made for me for my 40th birthday. He sent me a spreadsheet with almost 7,000 music titles that he had downloaded from the internet. He put the 20 songs I picked onto the CD.

Nox

2011-03-11T21:45:00.004-05:00

I've been a fan of Anne Carson since Autobiography of Red (discussed at our meeting on 7/20/1999). Next time you are meandering through the poetry section of your favorite book store, see if they have a copy of Nox, spend a few minutes browsing through the pages, and let me know what you think about it.

The Warren Cup

2011-03-04T20:19:00.002-05:00

I've just learned about this, or heard about it but never saw an image (or am approaching senility more quickly than I ever imagined possible) — in any event, to share with those of you who have been as ignorant or clueless (or witless) as I … The Warren Cup. By the way, NSFW (but what do I know) … or TGIF — it's the weekend (that much I do know)!

Pingpong Howl

2011-03-03T12:46:00.003-05:00

I was not, forty years ago, nor now, so captivated by "Howl" as most people were last night. Some verses I would have read aloud then—except for the overwhelming liveliness of our discussion—exemplify for me the "brilliantly absurdist poem" Perloff characterizes in her review below:

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
…
I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

(verses 68, 69, and 104; pages 120, 121, and 174 in the graphic novel).

The first "pingpong" has to evoke a laugh; the second, reflection; and the last, if memory serves, poignance. Taken together, the best three lines in the poem. If I can find a way to read the rest of the poem this way, it will be for me not merely historically important (both as literature and as event) but intrinsically memorable.

"Holy, holy, holy hyperbole!"

2011-03-03T12:04:00.001-05:00

When the young Allen Ginsberg (ably played by James Franco) reads this line from the "Moloch" section of "Howl" in the smoke-filled Six Gallery in San Francisco (on October 7, 1955), the guys in the front row, including Neal Cassady, "secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver", break into laughter. The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit: they know, and Allen knows, that "Howl", far from being the romantic cry of the heart or grand political jeremiad it is often presumed to be, is in fact a brilliantly absurdist poem, whose complex baroque structure teeters between high seriousness and wry self-mockery, hallucinatory fervour and comic deflation.

So the beginning of Marjorie Perloff's exceptionally interesting review in the February 18, 2011, issue of the Times Literary Supplement. I would provide a link but it would only work for subscribers. Still, anyone interested in the movie, the poem, the poet, or the times (his then, ours now) will be rewarded by the trek to any library with a copy.

Unspeakable Love, New Edition

2011-02-27T15:36:00.003-05:00

Brian Whitaker, the Guardian Middle East correspondent, wrote on (in?) his blog recently that despite covering the uproar that continues to take place in his beat he is preparing a second edition of Unspeakable Love which we read four years ago on homosexuality in the Middle East. He says that in the five years since it was published, much has happened and changed. I for one will be ordering a copy as soon as it's available.

Buy Frank A Drink

2011-02-27T10:59:00.002-05:00

Frank Kameny needs no introduction to BookMenDC. Unfortunately his meagre social security check is no longer covering his basic needs. Today and tomorrow all donations to Helping Our Brothers and Sisters go directly to Kameny. HOBS volunteer Ben Carver has set up a FaceBook page "Buy Frank A Drink". If you read this after March 1st and want to contribute, go there.

"A Man Within"

2011-02-26T13:31:00.004-05:00

Two local PBS stations will be broadcasting the latest episode of Independent Lens — "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within," tomorrow, Sunday, February 27: WETA at 2:00 am, and WMPT2 at 10:30 pm. We've read The Wild Boys, and Burroughs was a pal of Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" we are discussing this Tuesday.

Howl

2011-02-23T19:11:00.001-05:00

There is an essay in the Canning book on page 183 "Howl and Other Poems." It might be of interest to read it before next week's meeting.

Streetcar Named Desire - the Film

2011-02-20T18:56:00.002-05:00

I just finished watching for the second time the complete Streetcar film with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, and was tremendously moved by the film. Remembering some of the comments at our discussion two weeks ago, I know some thought that Brando was overemphasized in the film version, and it's true his performance is so mesmerizing you can't take your eyes off him -- or his body -- when he is performing. Leigh was deliberately dressed old fashioned and fussy and somehow it didn't add much to her character, and despite the occasional lapse into her Scarlet O'Hara voice, she delivered most of her lines in an affecting, scattered way that helped tremendously in making the last scene very moving. I now understand why this is one of the great roles for women and why Brando can be accused of skewing it. At the same time I don't believe he gave a better performance in any other film. But those who have never seen it, the wait is worth it.

By the way, the music didn't seem to jive with the music directions in the stage version.

Two Old-Time Brits

2011-02-08T21:11:00.004-05:00

A couple of articles of interest to our members and available online: James Fenton in reviewing Christopher Isherwood's second volume of diaries in the TLS makes timely animadversions on the recent heteronormativity of "gay marriage"; and Joan Acocella surveys J.R. Ackerley's œuvre in a recent The New Yorker. To my surprise in checking our list (v.i.) I discover that we have read none of his work! My Father and Myself would be an obvious choice, though My Dog Tulip about his Alsatian bitch "Queenie" is incomparably droll and has much to recommend it.

Larboard Watch

2011-01-04T09:01:00.003-05:00

Those of you who don't read music won't be able to thank me … and those who do, will probably not want to! Zheesh! I guess you had to be there. Cope is interesting in showing how much people a hundred years ago had to rely on home/self-entertainment. Illustrating that was the best part of the movie Bright Star where Keats got to sing clarinet in the Mozart Adagio.

Cope & Wojnarowicz

2010-12-24T14:51:00.003-05:00

I picked up Bertram Cope's Year and couldn't put it down. What a delight! Kudos to Steve for such an excellent pairing with "Hide/Seek".

And speaking of which, a friend J.C. (not né Christ) has supplied me with a link to Wojnarowicz' banned-in-Smithsonian "A Fire in My Belly". Click "Vimeo" for a larger image. (This belongs as a comment to Terry's posting but I'm publishing it separately since it might get lost there.)

Hide/Seek

2010-12-12T17:12:00.001-05:00

Club members will greatly enjoy the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery (until February 13, 2011). It includes portraits of several of the authors we’ve read over the years as well as paintings and painters well known to gay men. The theme of the exhibition is how people occupying the “position of influential marginality in modern society” (apparently this includes such painters as John Singer Sargent) “crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits,” forming a “powerful artistic and cultural legacy that has been hidden in plain sight for more than a century.” This is from the Gallery’s brochure. Can’t say I got all that, or even any of it, from my first viewing, but I’m definitely going back for more and hope to learn. There was a review in the New York Times on Saturday, and Frank Rich took on the controversy the exhibition has spawned in today’s paper.

"Pandemic and Celeste"

2010-11-27T16:58:00.003-05:00

Among other questions, Terry had asked at the previous meeting, during the discussion of Jaime Gil de Biedma's poems in Persistent Voices, what the title of "Pandemic and Celeste" referred to. Here's translator James Nolan's note about "Pandemic and Celeste" from Longing, the book of Gil de Biedma's selected poems that he translated and edited for City Lights Books in 1993:

Pandemic and Celeste: (a) The title refers to the two Aphrodites mentioned in the Symposium, symbolizing promiscuous and monogamous love. (b) Catullus, in poem VII, considers Lesbia's question: "You ask how many of your kisses, Lesbia, would be enough for me?" The answer is quoted here in the epigraph: "As numerous as the sands of Libya...or a the stars, when night is quiet, which contemplate the furtive loves of men." (c) The first stanza quotes from Baudelaire's "To the Reader": "my likeness--my brother." (d) "The poet" of the third stanza is John Donne, paraphrased from "The Ecstasy." (e) The fourth stanza quotes from Mallarme's "The Afternoon of a Fawn": "of the languor poorly savored between two people." (f) In English, it is impossible to keep the ambiguous gender of the su referring to the lover in the final stanzas. The choice should clearly be "his," although in Gil de Biedma's love poetry the homoeroticism is never explicit.

Persky's

2010-11-25T19:18:00.001-05:00

got a wiki (in case anyone is interested)

Bookmen DC Group on Facebook

2010-11-17T23:27:00.001-05:00

After consulting with some other members, I have made the Bookmen DC Facebook group an Open Group. Anyone can join and invite others to join. Group info and content can be viewed by anyone and may be indexed by search engines.

Walking in London

2010-11-03T23:37:00.003-04:00

The dissertation I mentioned this evening is Walking in London: The Fiction of Neil Bartlett, Sarah Waters, and Alan Hollinghurst: Writing missing voices of sexuality, class, and gender back into history through reimagining the city by Julie Cleminson, Brunel University thesis, 2009.

The chapter on "Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall" has some very pertinent comments on some of the themes we discussed, including references to the Colony Club, London, featuring someone somewhat resembling Mother.

Sarah Waters sounds interesting. An article of hers—"A Girton Girl on a Throne: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906-1933"—appeared in the Spring, 1994 issue of Feminist Review. The abstract reads

The extraordinary life of Christina Vasa, the seventeenth-century cross-dressing Queen of Sweden who resigned her crown, her country and her faith, has intrigued and inspired biographers and historians for three hundred years. In the nineteenth century, and in the early part of this one, biographies of Christina, offering a vast range of interpretations of her puzzling career, proliferated.

"All of Me"

2010-11-01T18:42:00.008-04:00

I wonder what Mother (Madame/Madam) sounded like when she sang this song. Ruth Etting was the first to record it and youtube.com has a recording of her singing it (probably the original). When it comes to the song itself, I find I prefer the original. In general, as well. No matter how marvelous, otherwise, it's like seeing a pearl instead of a grain of sand.

And here, for what it's worth, are the lyrics:

You took my kisses and you took my love
You taught me how to care
Am I to be just a remnant of a one-sided love affair

All you took I gladly gave
There's nothing left for me to save

All of me
Why not take all of me
Can't you see
I'm no good without you
Take my lips
I want to lose them
Take my arms
I'll never use them
Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry
How can I go on dear without you
You took the part that once was my heart
So why not take all of me

Canonical and Forgotten

2010-10-20T10:45:00.003-04:00

Two books have recently been published with lists of books we all should have read or we all shouldn't have forgotten about. I haven't looked closely at either and both appear to have been rather informally collected—but particularly as we get ready for another list, people may find a perusal of these lists worthwhile.

The first list is Richard Canning's 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read:

Yahweh  Samuel 1 & 2
Tablets  Gilgamesh
Sappho  Poems
Plato  The Symposium
Horace Walpole  Letters
Herman Melville  Moby Dick
Walt Whitman  Leaves of Grass
Arthur Rimbaud  A Season in Hell
Henry James  The Bostonians
A.E. Housman  A Shropshire Lad
Oscar Wilde  De Profundis
Colette  Claudine at School
Thomas Mann  Death in Venice
Ronald Firbank  The Flower Beneath the Foot
Virginia Woolf  Mrs. Dalloway
Marcel Proust  Time Regained
Ivy Compton-Burnett  More Women than Men
Constantine Cavafy  Poems
Djuna Barnes  Nightwood
Vita Sackville-West  Letters to Virginia Woolf
Evelyn Waugh  Brideshead Revisited
Marguerite Yourcenar  Memoirs of Hadrian
Patricia Highsmith  The Price of Salt
G.F. Green  In the Making
Yukio Mishima  Forbidden Colors
Allen Ginsberg  Howl and Other Poems
James Baldwin  Giovanni's Room
Harold Brodkey  First Love and Other Sorrows
Shelagh Delaney  A Taste of Honey
Christopher Isherwood  A Single Man
José Lezama Lima  Paradiso
James Purdy  Eustace Chisholm and the Works
J.R. Ackerley  My Father and Myself
Mañuel Puig  Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
William Burroughs  The Wild Boys
Mary Renault  The Persian Boy
Coleman Dowell  Too Much Flesh and Jabez
Andrew Holleran  Dancer from the Dance
Audre Lorde  The Cancer Journals
Alice Walker  The Color Purple
Edmund White  A Boy's Own Story
Jeanette Winterson  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Hervé Guibert  To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Rebecca Brown  The Terrible Girls
Tom Spanbauer  The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
John Foster  Take Me to Paris, Johnny
Gore Vidal  Palimpset
Matthew Stadler  Allan Stein
Douglas Wright  Ghost Dance
Susan Smith  Burning Dreams

The second, covering recent gay fiction now out of print, is The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered:

Glenway Wescott  The Apple of the Eye
Roger Peyrefitte  The Exile of Capri
Donald Windham  Two Peple
George Baxt  A Queer Kind of Death
Kyle Onstott & Lance Horner  Child of the Sun
John Donovan  I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip
Daniel Curzon  Something You Do in the Dark
Lynn Hall  Stick and Stones
Richard Hall  Couplings
Charles Nelson  The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
Paul Rogers  Saul's Book
Agustin Gomez-Arcoz  The Carnivorous Lamb
Robert Ferro  The Blue Star
George Whitmore  Nebraska
Paul Reed  Longing
John Gilgun  Music I Never Dreamed Of
Allen Barnett  The Body and Its Dangers
Neil Bartlett  Ready to Catch him Should He Fall
Patrick Roscoe  Birthmarks
Melvin Dixon  Vanishing Rooms
Michael Grumley  Life Drawing
James McCourt  Time Remaining
Bruce Benderson  User
Mark Merlis  American Studies
Douglas Sandowick  Sacred Lips of the Bronx
J.S. Marcus  The Captain's Fire
Rabih Almaddine  The Perv: Stories

Voting?

2010-10-19T15:19:00.006-04:00

One of the things I like about our group is that we waste no time (no meeting time) debating/arguing/deciding about what to read. I've belonged to groups—I'm sure we all have—where a good quarter of every hour was engaged in that activity, and although the liveliest, it could also be the most vituperative and aggrieved as well. It was early recognized that an open and public book group such as ours could not function along the lines of private and closed ones. In those, typically, the members—limited and known—vote at some meeting what book(s) they will read in the future. We have had as many as a hundred "members" on our mailing list: some regular, some irregular, some never seen. How, where, and when would we get together and vote?

What we have done instead is publish a list of proposals and ask people, all and sundry, to designate the books they'd like to read. But it should be understood that those "votes" are entirely advisory. The Facilitator, otherwise known as the "benevolent despot," takes the information from those "votes" and tries to come up with a balanced list that will please most of people who attend or might attend. If he fails, he facilitates an empty room.

(An example of this balancing might be instructive. When I was facilitator, I offered people the option of voting "NO". This was something of a veto, particularly coming from members who attended regularly. Of course if many members, especially frequently attending members, voted "Yes", they could override a veto. Once, I got a "vote" from someone on the mailing list who had never attended a meeting. It was sprinkled with NO's. I of course ignored it.)

All of this is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that the voting list is for the benefit of the facilitator. If he can use a Ouija board to divine what people might like to read, well and good. The voting list has tended to be long and cumbersome—one reason for votes to be seldom and for lists to be long. But a consensus is forming I think for shorter lists and along with that should be other means for the facilitator to be informed of what members—present, past, and future—might like to read. I'm unsure what those other means might be (informal consultation?). Whatever they are should obviously be useful and agreeable to the presiding facilitator. This is something for us think about.

The rest is NOT silence

2010-10-18T18:12:00.004-04:00

(Yet to be published is a birthday mesostic in which Cage pays tribute to Cunningham's cock and ass!)

—from Alex Ross' "Searching for Silence" in the 10/4/10 issue of The New Yorker … John Cage and Merce Cunningham, being one of history's most notable homo pairings.

[a "mesostic," I mention, having been ignorant of it myself until now, being an acrostic in the middle, as (quoting from the article):


                   Much of our
             of borEdom
                   Toward talks in
         it misled Him
               diplOmatic skill to
place to place but Does it look
        at present Most
                fivE Iranian fishermen
                 cuTbacks would not

… hmm, and then again, maybe I can wait]

Bookmen DC reading list and other thoughts

2010-10-16T19:42:00.001-04:00

Gentlemen:

I have been giving some thought recently to Bookmen DC. I want to share my suggestions and ideas with you, in order to stimulate an open exchange of ideas about the future direction of our group. I am concerned that some may take my ideas, suggestions, or thoughts personally. This is not my intention. Bookmen DC has evolved over time incorporating the suggestions of members. My ideas are made in the spirit of continually improving and evolving the group. The goal is to attract new members. As a potential AARP member, I really believe that we also can learn from the perspectives of new, younger members who might want to join our group. The challenge is how to attract different age groups to join our group. Younger readers are more comfortable materials that are available online, including periodicals, journals and blogs. The advantage of these online reading materials is that they are often available at no cost.

Steve have been doing a wonderful job facilitating. I, myself, remember the early growing pains of our group: the difficulty of trying to please everyone and yet still make sure the list included a variety of books. Over the past few years, your dedication and persistence is extraordinary. I am constantly amazed that a group with no formal structure or by-laws has managed to last do so long. I am concerned, though, about the declining attendance at our meetings. At many meetings the same 4 or 5 people show up on a regular basis.

We have been considering ways to attract new members. We started using Facebook as an additional venue to attract new members. The recent technical difficulties with facebook interrupted this process, but the Bookmen DC Facebook Group is up and running again. In an attempt to attract new members, I have made the upcoming Bookmen DC Facebook events “public” so that non Bookmen DC members will be able to see them and might attend meetings. I hope this will catch the attention some potential members who might bring the perspective of a younger generation. It is possible to make the Facebook Bookmen DC Group an “open” group, but I am not totally comfortable with this yet and welcome the views of others on this topic.

I have also set up a test Group in order to experiment with the features of the “New Facebook Groups”(I posted a blog on our website discussion the pros and cons). I welcome any members who may want to join the test group to see how it works. The new Facebook groups have many features that enhance the group experience. I have seen some flaws and I have sent suggested to facebook to try to modify or improve them. I hope is that the new members will bring the perspective of a younger generation. There is a possibly for making the Facebook Bookmen DC Group an “open” group, but I am not totally comfortable with this yet.

I like Steve’s idea of having guest facilitators, i.e., the one who actually recommended a book – of course guest facilitator must commit to actually show up. This might help to vary the format of the discussion. Our group has never been static. Bookmen DC has evolved over time, and we have all learned from the opinions of old and new members.

I think at our last meeting we briefly discussed the next reading list and how long it should run. My preference is that 6 months should be the maximum. My reasons are as follows:

1. The length of the list may discourage people considering joining the group. They may feel that they have no opportunity to contribute to a reading list that runs for many months.

2. Having a more frequent selection process may give old and new members a greater sense of inclusion in the selection process, even though their choices may not be selected.

3. We would be able to select more topical books if our list ran for a shorter period.

4. It would be interesting to add reading suggestions from younger prospective members for us to hear the perspective of younger readers, which views are rather lacking in our current meetings.

5. I propose adding topical, gay-themed articles from quality journals, articles, and blogs by prominent GLTB authors, perhaps as a “wild-card” selection on some kind of periodic basis.

I hope this will stimulate a civil discussion on the future direction of out group. As for myself, I always seen the group as an opportunity to read books I would never have read on my own, and to meet people with similar interests to mine. Some readings I like and sometimes not. I look forward to seeing you at future meetings.

Tom

Facebook: "New" Groups vs. "Old" Groups, etc

2010-10-09T10:17:00.001-04:00

Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages:

Facebook has rolled out a new Groups design. “Bookmen DC” is currently an "old" group on Facebook. Right now "old" groups can't be converted into a "new" group. More info is available at the link http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1193 . The new groups feature seems to be tailored to those people with hundreds of facebook friends, who want more control over their interaction with sub-groups of their friends (e.g., “real” friends and family members). I think Facebook is trying to become the new Google. Facebook seems to be in constant flux with regard to features and functionality, so I suspect that they will be adjusting the groups features as they get feedback about the feature of “new groups”. I have already submitted a few suggestions. Over the past few months, the privacy settings for Facebook have become more robust and easier to use.

I have created a test “new group” (“BookmenDC” [no space between “Bookmen” and “DC”]) and have been tinkering with the features of the new Facebook Groups:

· New groups only allows invites to people who have been “friended”. Old groups allows invites to all other facebook members using email accounts.

· New groups does not allow more than one “admin” per group.

· New groups allows documents posting and sharing using a shared notepad.

· New groups does not have discussion topics boards.

· New groups allows online group chats with other group members.

· New groups allows a group email address (BookmenDC@groups.facebook.com for my test group)

Facebook Pages is only an option for more formal organizations than ours http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=904 .

Bookmen DC Events on Facebook:

We have been experimenting with Facebook as an online venue for Bookmen DC. I have posted our group’s upcoming meetings as “public” events. This will allow non-group members to see the details of the meetings on Facebook and perhaps attract some new members to our meetings.

The Greatest Poem in the English Language

2010-10-08T17:29:00.008-04:00

Ben Jonson's translation

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay,
But thus, thus, keeping endlesse Holy-day,
Let us together closely lie, and kisse,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleas'd, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

of Petronius'

Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas,
et taedet Veneris statim peractae.
Non ergo ut pecudes libidinosae
caeci protinus irruamus illuc;
(nam languescit amor peritque flamma);
sed sic sic sine fine feriati
et tecum jaceamus osculantes.
Hic nullus labor est ruborque nullus:
hoc juvit, juvat, et diu juvabit;
hoc no deficit, incipitque semper.

Anyone with any Latin will see how literal Jonson's translation is. But onto Petronius' fastidious Epicureanism there is an overlay of Judeo-Christian shame and guilt (rubor needn't mean more than blushing nor taedet more than being wearied). Both of course have the same strategy, that of never finishing something to be free from distasteful consequence. And neither could have anticipated our lucky escape from the Heat-Death of the Universe (law of entropy) to a continuing Big Bang or Inflationary Epoch. We who together closely lie and kiss come as close as mortals can to the happy figures on the Grecian Urn.

Petronius' hendecasyllables are quite artful but to a startlingly regular iambic line Jonson has added rhyme—rhyme which in the last couplet highlights the binary of finishing and beginning ("never"/"ever"). He also has a "kisse" that explodes into the aural experience of the poem and continues to live and last in the next (and last) three lines of the poem with its resounding echo "this".

As I said at our last meeting, to call anything the greatest out of such a large field is to be rhetorically provocative. What I wish to provoke with this evaluation is the deep musical satisfaction of a poem without "deep" image, indeed virtually without image of any sort whatsoever ("like lustfull beasts"). This is high heresy to all poetics since 1798 ("Lyrical Ballads"). This is all Goatfoot and Milktongue—Twinbird has flown the coop! And what would be a numbing metrical regularity (only disturbed at the outset by the trochee "Doing") is transcended by a flexibility of phrasing that spills over these feet as a high wave over rocks.

doing
a filthy pleasure is
and short
and done
we straight repent us of the sport

Rather than re-lineate the whole poem this way I offer a challenge … or an exercise, a challenging exercise. Set your metronome at 40 bpm and read the poem. I take 30 beats. (Note: not every line has three beats, and key words often occur off beat.)

Nietzsche on Petronius

2010-10-08T14:00:00.004-04:00

Terry has brought this section (28) from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil to my attention:

What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style.... There are honestly meant translations that … are almost falsifications of the original, merely because its bold and merry tempo (which leaps over and obviates all dangers in things and words) could not be translated. A German is almost incapable of presto in his language … Petronius [is] untranslatable for him. … Who, finally, could venture on a German translation of Petronius, who … was a master of presto in invention, ideas, and words? What do the swamps of the sick, wicked world, even the "ancient world," matter in the end, when one has the feet of a wind as he did, the rush, the breath, the liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run!

—(Kaufman's translation). I'm still taking in that wonderful conception, whether it applies to Petronius or not, of "the liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run!" Nietzsche interestingly (and even more interestingly modest here in his silence) himself brought presto into the German language.

The Latin Sexual Vocabulary

2010-10-06T21:22:00.001-04:00

The book that I mentioned during tonight’s meeting is “The Latin Sexual Vocabulary” by J.N. Adams, Johns Hopkins University Press. This is a wonderful book to browse through.

Quoting the back cover: “…collects for the first time evidence of Latin obscenities and sexual euphemisms drawn from both literary and nonliterary sources from the early Republic to about the 4^th century A.D.”

transmission of the text of Petronius' Satyricon and textual criticism

2010-10-06T00:41:00.002-04:00

The history of the transmission of the text of Petronius’ Satyricon is very complicated. All the details of this history are available in Konrad Muller’s 3^rd edition “Petronius Satyrica, Schlemengeschichte”. In English a more concise history is given by M.D. Reeve in “Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics”. I have neither of these, but was able to put together a brief history of the transmission using “Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature”. This book also has a chapter on Textual Criticism, parts of which I summarize further down. For those interested in the historical development of textual criticism, I would recommend “Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450 – 1800”.

Petronius:

Much manuscript copying occurred in the Abbeys of the Loire Valley during the 9^th century. We know that copies of Petronius were circulating there during the 9^th century. These manuscripts were probably used by those who compiled collections of quotations called florilegia. The Florileguim Gallicum is a source for parts of Petronius. The Abby of Fleury is particularly important for the history of the transmission of Petronius. It was sacked by the Huguenots in 1562. Fluery’s manuscripts were purchased by Pierre Daniel. One of the best Petronius manuscripts comes from his collection. Other important collections that included Petronius were acquired during the same time period by Pierre Pithou, Jacques Bongars, Joseph Scaliger, and Jacques Cujas. Quoting Scribes and Scholars: “the complicated history of the text of Petronius in the latter half of the sixteenth century epitomizes a group of French Scholars of this period… Its complexity is also an indication of the difficulty of piecing together the elaborate web formed by the interrelationship of men and manuscript in this period, even in the case of central texts...”

Poggio was a Papal Secretary during the early 15^th century. He is very important in the history of the transmission of manuscript copies of ancient texts. He found the “exerpta vulgaria” in England, which he described as, “particula petronii”. All of the existing 15^th century manuscripts of the exerpta descend from Poggio’s copy. In 1423 at Cologne he found the “Cena Trimalchonis”. The copy that he commissioned of the Cologne manuscript is our only source for it. This manuscript was lost for a while. It resurfaced in 1650. The Cena was first printed in Padua in 1664.

Textual Criticism:

1. Recension: attempted reconstruction of earliest recoverable form of text from surviving manuscripts.

a. Establish the relationship of existing manuscripts to each other.

b. Eliminate from consideration those that are derived exclusively from other existing manuscripts.

c. Use the established relationships of those that remain to reconstruct the lost manuscript[s] from which the surviving manuscripts descend.

2. Limits of Recension.

a. Assumes all reading and errors are transmitted “vertically” from one book to copies that are made of it.

b. Assumes all surviving manuscripts can be traced to a single archetype.

c. Does not always account for the possibility that ancient authors made corrections or additions to their works (for example Cicero).

3. Corruptions.

a. Mistakes induced by ancient or medieval handwriting.

b. Corruptions from changes in spelling or pronunciation.

c. Omissions by mistake.

d. Errors of addition: letters, glosses (interlinear notes), and marginalia.

e. Errors of transposition: letters, verses, and text word order.

f. Errors induced by context.

g. Errors induced by influence of Christian thoughts.

h. Deliberate action of scribe.

4. The relationship of age and merit in individual manuscripts.

5. Indirect transmission of texts through quotation in another ancient author or through collections of quotations.

Re-starting Bookmen DC on Facebook.

2010-09-26T12:06:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-16T09:14:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-15T22:30:00.005-04:00

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

2010-09-12T01:02:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-05T17:19:00.003-04:00

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

2010-09-04T11:44:00.005-04:00

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

2010-09-03T13:46:00.005-04:00

(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 approriate 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!

FaceBook Presence

2010-08-22T09:20:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Tom we now are a presence on FaceBook. If you're already a member of this social-networking site, you need only search on "BookMen DC" and ask to join. If you're not already a member, you'll have to become one. I certainly understand the reluctance of our older (50+) members to dip into this internet swamp, but come on in, the water's swell!

Nights with "Andrew" Holleran

2010-08-22T09:02:00.012-04:00

During a recent vacation in Truro, I happened to pick up the copy of Nights in Aruba that I had read when it first came out in paperback twenty-six years ago. Anything after Dancer from the Dance, the great American gay novel, would have been somewhat disappointing. Aruba was more so. But as I began re-reading it, I was reminded what a very good writer Holleran is and was caught up in his Proustian reminiscence. Maybe some intolerance, some moralizing, some political correctness had—as it has—prevented me from doing this novel justice. After a few chapters, however, when "Andrew" (as we might say "Marcel") has arrived in Manhattan and begun the infamous Holleran mope, the remembrance of books read, like a tisane-sopped madeleine, became overpowering. You want to shake him and scream GET A LIFE! Neither "Andrew" nor Holleran is unperceptive of his condition. That oddly makes it worse. There's no distancing the character from the author, nor the author from the person. And we know now, which we blessedly didn't twenty-six years ago, that this saga will continue, through the interminable Beauty of Men to the gratefully brief Grief.

"Andrew" it turns out isn't the narrator's name. We learn very late in the book that it is "Paul." There's a host of characters whose names we learn only very late in the book. Poor editing and multiple revisions? Or is this adult baptism (a thing Lady Bracknell called "grotesque and irreligious") a deeper symptom of Paul's inability to come out to his hyperduliated mother.

More pertinently peculiar is that despite Paul's devotion to the beauty of men—that's what his life in Manhattan, indeed on Earth, has been all about—we get no descriptions of beauty in men, or beautiful men, or beautiful parts of men, or parts of beautiful men. Not that Holleran isn't long on descriptions: numerous sunsets and church services are endlessly described. Similarly (?), in spite of all the sex Paul has, no sex act nor aspect of any sex act is described. To speak it is to confess it? That's what Paul's life seems to say. So long as his homosexuality remains unspoken, he need never worry about his mother hearing of it.

I'm looking forward to my next re-reading of Dancer from the Dance because it's not obvious to me where "Andrew" (to use a generic for all the narrators in the last three autobiographical novels) comes from. Though there are first-person pentimenti in Dancer, they seem as puzzling and inconsequential as those in Madame Bovary. I wonder what happened to Holleran that he gave up the discipline (?) of the third-person to wallow as he has since in the mope of the first.