"Merging Fiction and Fact"

BookMen are deep, I trust, in their reading of Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. After finishing (though at any time really — there are no "spoilers" for this book), they may be interested to read Kat Long's interview on the Lambda Literary Review website. Also worthwhile is Terri Salomon's review of this book there. Unreal Life has oddly had more blurbs (even without doubling) than reviews (at least that I've been able to locate).

Too Much Flesh!?

After reading the first of the essays assigned in Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books, I googled Coleman Dowell to see how preposterous he was. I landed on the Amazon site of his book, "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" and found that the image on the cover was not reproduced unless you click on the image. With good reason, as can be seen here. After reading the critique, you will understand the reason why.

BookMen's Disco Faves

Very good discussion last night about Alice Echols' Hot Stuff. I only regret that none of our younger readers showed up. We who did have lived through that era (some even danced through it—ecstatically!). I would have been most interested to have learned what disco had meant to someone who hadn't and how that perception had been altered by reading the book. All who attended enthusias-tically recommend Hot Stuff, if any young or old have been sitting on the sidelines wondering. I include the Saturday Night Fever poster because the book in all its multi-facetedness opened my eyes widest about this movie. I'm not sure I want to re-view it but I do feel as though I was formerly perhaps too dismissive. Anyhow, everyone loves a list and here's everyone's chance to pile on. Email me or better add a comment listing your (next) favorite three and I'll add them to the list below.

 "Make Me Believe in You" — Patti Jo          — 1973
              "Giving Up" — Zulema            — 1973
          "Dancing Queen" — Abba              — 1976
          "Kiss Me Again" — Dinosaur          — 1977
            "I Feel Love" — Donna Summer      — 1978
         "I Will Survive" — Gloria Gaynor     — 1978
         "Heart of Glass" — Blondie           — 1979
              "Hot Stuff" — Donna Summer      — 1979
          "We Are Family" — Sister Sledge     — 1979
               "Y.M.C.A." — Village People    — 1979
"Is It All Over My Face?" — Loose Joints      — 1980
      "Don't You Want Me" — The Human League  — 1981
      "Do You Wanna Funk" — Sylvester         — 1982
       "It's Raining Men" — The Weather Girls — 1982
                 "Gloria" — Laura Branigan    — 1982

P.S. I threw this together quickly. If anyone has a better youtube link, please let me know.

Next Reading List Recommendation

I long ago tired of juvie lit: coming-out stories and other YA prose. I figure we paid our dues with Rainbow Boys nine years ago. (Rainbow Party would have been more fun and became an éclat du scandale but … our dues had been paid.) Now for readers who want to harken back to the jeers and tears of yesteryears without the rigors of Musil's Young Törless (as too few here have), I can enthusiastically recommend Daryl Hine's own memoir of his fourteenth year encompassing the year and summer of Seventh Grade. Hine's experience outwardly could not have been more different from my own but I was at times almost overwhelmed with the remembered sensations of that first season of full-onset puberty. Academic Festival Overtures besides being evocative and witty is a quick read. Good prose like a strong current carries one through a novel. Good verse positively propels one. There's no figuring out how or where the emphasis should go. The meter virtually dictates it. You will not have had so much trouble putting a book of poetry down since … well, since The Golden Gate, which we read six years ago.

On the first day of school and the first page of the book we are introduced to the classmate who instantly becomes our narrator's crush (and who will continue so strikingly all the way to the end). The crush of course is everything Hine is not: poised, athletic, and popular. And the spark of attraction is oddly mutual, though certainly differing in intensity and kind. That afternoon as Daryl is walking home from school, the crush on his bicycle delivering papers offers him a ride.

Squeezed in front of him uncomfortably astraddle
   Between his pedalling legs and the handlebars,
I saw flash past the blocks that I had trudged that morning
   As he cut corners and careened about parked cars.
He had to reach around me to get each newspaper
   He threw, without stopping, onto somebody's lawn.
When I admired his aim, which was not quite unerring,
   He laughed: "You ought to see me do it before dawn."
I wondered then how many disgruntled subscribers
   Have any idea how fortunate they are,
As they retrieve their daily papers from the bushes,
   To have The Evening Sun brought by the morning star?

(Of course I quote this partly for its similarity and contrast to "Editio Princeps*" which we discussed at our last meeting.)

Daryl Hine 1936-2012

Keith calls our attention to the death of Daryl Hine three days ago. He also recently brought my attention to Hine's poem "Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles". None of us perhaps can feel nothing special about Patroclus and Achilles (no matter how much David Halperin we read). This poem seems peculiarly severe on Patroclus, but I find it very engaging and the last line spot on.

How clumsy he is putting on the amour of another,
His friend’s, perhaps remembering how they used to arm each other
Fitting the metal tunics to one another’s breast
And setting on each other’s head the helmet’s bristling crest.
Now for himself illicitly he foolishly performs
Secret ceremonial with that other’s arms,
Borrowed, I say stolen, for they are not his own,
On the afternoon of battle, late, trembling, and alone.

Night terminal to fighting falls on the playing field
As to his arm he fastens the giant daedal shield.
A while the game continues, a little while the host
Lost on the obscure litoral, scattered and almost
Invisible pursue the endless war with words
Jarring in the darkening air impassable to swords.

But when he steps forth from the tent where Achilles broods
Patroclus finds no foe at hand, surrounded by no gods,
Only the chill of evening strikes him to the bone
Like an arrow piercing where the armour fails to join,
And weakens his knees under the highly polished greaves.
Evening gentle elsewhere is loud on the shore, it grieves
It would seem for the deaths of heroes, their disobedient graves.

China Mountain Zhang may seem like nine first-person short stories connected only, or mainly, by the eponymous hero whose narrative begins, ends, and alternates with those of four other characters (two of whom on Mars are rather remotely connected). There is a tenth story, however, "Protection," appearing in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine [right], that was not included. Protection is a Reform Through Labor camp. Recall that it was partly to escape just such a camp in Xinjiang that Zhang's lover Hintao commits suicide. The RTL as depicted in this story is somewhat milder than the one suggested in Xinjiang. As it well should. It's located after all in backward America. Hegemons such as China (we know from history, as well as our own life experience) are always anxious about the loosening of their moral fiber.

The narrator in this short story is Janee, a scrappy, smart, street kid in for larceny and assault. When a somewhat older "Political" prisoner named Paul is brutalized by the camp authorities, Janee takes a liking to him owing to his initial show of resistance. She takes him under her "protection" which is a very good deal for him since he'd otherwise have been a mark for every other prisoner in the camp. But Paul can offer something to Janee, a wider world of education and experience. Her experience in the camp is something of a race between her evolving political consciousness due to Paul versus the grinding labor and conditioning of camp routine. Quilt-making, in its most piecemeal aspects, is the labor that leads to "reform" in camp Protection. As in every story in China Mountain Zhang that work is described in detail and is an ultimate in alienation of labor. The race goes not to the swift and the finish line is prefigured some centuries earlier in 1984.

Why wasn't "Protection" included in CMZ? A connection with Zhang would have been easy enough to concoct. Paul is not just a political prisoner. He's a former high-school teacher who has written an incriminating letter to a former male student. Paul comes from Cleveland but he could equally as well have come from Brooklyn and have crossed paths with Zhang somewhere there, e.g. San-xiang's political study group. The reason not to have included the short story, I think (other perhaps than a publisher's concern for a tidier, i.e. shorter, book), is that Reform Through Labor, since it's a central motive in the novel's central episode, is best kept menacingly vague. Any depiction no matter how horrific would have detracted from the Hintao story.

The Hine and the Beaver

We recently discussed Daryl Hine and will continue to discuss Canada and (at least some of) its poets in Seminal. Along those lines, both lines, Jason Guriel's review of Hine's Recollected Poems 1951-2004 in Poetry five years ago will be of interest.