In anticipation

In anticipation of next month's read, Allan Gurganus: How I Write.

"Read your work aloud daily. Read it once a week to your friends. Provide the wine yourself."

Cavafy Sesquicentennial Celebration

Writers, actors, performers, translators and artists —

André Aciman, Michael Cunningham, Mark Doty, Olympia Dukakis, Craig Dykers, Edmund Keeley, Daniel Mendelsohn, Orhan Pamuk, Dimitris Papaioannou, and Kathleen Turner

— gather at the PEN American Center next month to bring to life one of the most original and influential Greek poets (and the only one we've ever read), Constantine P. Cavafy!

Thematic Body Parts

Still thinking back on Spanbauer's rollicking tale, I'm wondering if I overlooked a theme running through the book focused on a certain body part?

Toward the end we have severed arms, legs, and blind(-ish) eyes. We've got man-parts and lady-parts throughout the book, though handled so casually they seem disposable. Was anyone decapitated? Did Dellwood remain whole in the end?

Shed is clearly on a quest to find a family, where he came from, and where he belongs, but I never picked up on a quest to find a brain or a heart. Did anyone else?

Oct. 2 at AFSA — NOT Tenley

Short of a deus ex machina intervening to save the day, it looks like the federal government will shut down on Oct. 1, however temporarily. And that, in turn, normally means that the D.C. government—including the library system—would also shut down.

Mindful that Mayor Gray has sought to forestall an automatic closure by designating all municipal employees essential, I stopped by the Tenleytown Library on Friday to find out whether they had any guidance. The librarian I spoke with said that as far as she knows, if Uncle Sam closes, they still will, too.

Accordingly, let’s play it safe and move this Wednesday’s meeting to my office building in Foggy Bottom, where we meet on third Wednesdays: 2101 E St. NW. (AFSA headquarters).

Payette River Watershed

—cuz inquiring minds want to know!

Is "Necessary Errors" a Necessary Book?

Last month I flagged a fascinating Salon essay by Daniel D'Addario titled "Where's the Buzzed-About Gay Novel?" that I thought painted an (overly?) bleak picture of prospects for a breakthrough in the genre. So I'm delighted to report that reports of the death of gay literature may have been premature. Here's how D'Addario's latest Salon posting begins:

Earlier this summer, Salon asked where the buzzed-about gay novel was — the major literary novel taken seriously by critics and audiences that managed to convey in frank tones what it was like for gay people just as so many major literary novels do for straight people.

While Caleb Crain’s "Necessary Errors" may not quite be that book — it’s too particular about time and place to be extrapolated seamlessly to life in America 2013 — it’s a step in the right direction. The book, about which James Wood recently raved in The New Yorker (“'Necessary Errors' is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth,” the critic wrote), tells the story of Jacob, a callow youth who, having just graduated college in 1990, heads to Prague to escape anything and everything that can’t be set aside for a drink at the local gay bar or an impromptu trip to another city.

Jacob meets men, sleeps with men, hangs around with friends, drinks, travels — the whole thing is episodic in exactly the manner one’s early 20s are.  And yet the novel is notably gay in its sensibility as well as its subject matter--it's hard to imagine a novel about a man cycling through women bearing as little explicit moral judgment as does "Necessary Errors." We spoke to Caleb Crain about the degree to which his book is marketable to an audience publishers fear might not pick up a gay-themed book, about the creation of a protagonist, and about the debate over whether characters must be likable.

The interview follows at that point. Color me intrigued! 

Searching for the Seventies

Preceding back in time (v.i.), you have till Sunday to catch the Documerica Photography Project at the National Archives. Maybe a hundred photos from 1972-1977. Guess how many gay photos there are? Well, none, explicitly. But consider:

Can anyone do the Hustle?  Here's the caption:

Chicano teenager in El Paso's second ward. A classic barrio which is slowly giving way to urban renewal.

See if you can spot the two guys in the background who are about to not so slowly be doing a little "urban renewal."