Gay Anger & Erotic Ventriloquism

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

WARHOLCAPOTE

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

"Call Me by Your Name"

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

What Eagle Scouts Know

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

Books We'll Be Reading Next Year

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

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

BIOGRAPHY
The Tastemaker: Carl van Vechten… by Edward White

MEMOIR
Let’s Shut Out the World  by Kevin Bentley

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

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

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

Garth and Darryl

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

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

R.I.P., John Ashbery

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

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

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

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