In Memory of My Feelings

As some of you know, I took in the Jasper Johns retrospective, "Mind/Mirror," at the Whitney while visiting a close friend in the Big Apple last month. While I am not a skilled photographer, as you'll see (to put it mildly), I did take some photos of several paintings related to Frank O'Hara. So I'm posting those here, both as souvenirs of the exhibition and as a shoutout to the Brad Gooch biography we discussed last month, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara.

Ite lista est: BookMen DC's 2022 Reading List

This list incorporates selections approved during last year's nomination process, but not yet scheduled; those are denoted with an asterisk.

FICTION

*A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. 

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. 

Alec by William di Canzio. 

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. 

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin. 

Lie With Me by Philippe Bessone. 

*P.S. Your Cat Is Dead: A Novel by James Kirkwood. 

Plays Well With Others by Allan Gurganus. 

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. 

The Magician by Colm Toibin. 

*The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams. 

NON-FICTION

Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner. 

*No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions by Ryan Berg. 

Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples by Rodger Streitmatter.

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini.

BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR

A Tale of Two Omars: A Memoir of Family, Revolution and Coming Out During the Arab Spring by Omar Sharif Jr. 

Careening into Gay Midlife by James Daniels. 

Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks. 

Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman. 

*Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David Feinberg. 

POETRY

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. 

Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of the Greek Anthology translated by Daryl Hine. 

ANTHOLOGIES

*Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914, edited by Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt. 

'Tis Reading List Season!

 

Still more LGBTQ poets to know...

Once again, it's time for another compilation of LGBTQ poetry taken from Poem-a-Day. In some cases, I wasn't able to confirm that the poet is a member of our demographic, but the subject matter of the poem pretty clearly is. Anyway, enjoy! 

"Confessional to Famous Iranian Pop Singer Dariush" by Darius Atefat-Peckham

"What I really want to know is how rough, Melissa" by TC Tolbert

"French Leave" by Claude McKay

"XX Judgement" by Dan Lau

"a feeling has passed before a charted present" by Kimberly Alidio

"A Poem for Rebecca Wight" by Rachel Moritz

"A Fairy Tale of Blackboyhood" by Dashaun Washington

"Interior" by Jada Renee Allen

"The One Mockingbird Only Sings at Night" by Hannah Sanghee Park

"Belt Is Just Another Verb for Song" by Torrin A. Greathouse

Recalling the Cory Book Service

Richard Schaefers was kind enough to draw my attention to a fascinating Oct. 5 "American Chronicles" piece on The New Yorker's homepage: "The Book Club That Helped Spark the Gay-Rights Movement." (Not sure whether it will run in the print edition.) In it, Michael Waters recounts how "Donald Webster Cory" (real name: Edward Sagarin) came to establish the Cory Book Service, which distributed various gay and lesbian books to subscribers. He ran it from 1952 to 1954, before selling his mailing list and all but disavowing the project after coming under the influence of a disapproving therapist. It would re-emerge in 1957 as the Winston Book Service (run by a straight woman!) and operate for a decade before finally disbanding, under yet another owner, in 1969.

Frank O'Hara speaks!

Last night, a dozen of us gathered for a lively discussion of Brad Gooch's City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara that conincluded readings of three O'Hara poems. If you'd like to hear the poet himself read some of his works, here's a YouTube link courtesy of Bernard Welt.

In addition, Ernie Raskauskas was kind enough to share this delightful 2019 reminiscence of Joe LeSueur, O'Hara's longtime (and long-suffering) roommate and occasional lover, by his nephew, Jason S. Farr, who is also gay.

Jasper Johns, Footman

Although the renowned artist Jasper Johns does not figure prominently in our current selection, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, which we'll discuss this coming Wednesday, he does rate a few mentions in the index (pp. 315, 322-323 and 395). The last of those is the most significant:

"Jasper Johns made a sculpture of wood, lead, metal, brass and sand in 1961 titled Memory Piece (Frank O'Hara), in which a rubber cast of a foot in the sand was taken from a plaster foot of O'Hara's foot. 'I remember casting his foot on Front Street in my studio,' says Johns. 'I cast his foot and did a drawing for the piece, which included a cabinet with the drawers full of sand. At that time I had a house in South Carolina. I needed a carpenter but could never find anyone to do it. I think it was done after his death. But I gave Frank the drawing for it.' This was the piece referred to in O'Hara's letter-poem to Johns, written in 1963: 'Dear Jap, when I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand.'"

Johns, of course, is much in the news currently for the huge retrospective of his works ("Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror") that just opened at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here are reviews/commentaries from the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott and Sebastian Smee (the former concentrates on Johns' homosexuality, the latter more on his aesthetic) and the New York Times' Deborah Solomon and Holland Cotter. I'm planning to see the Whitney show later this month; not sure yet about going to Philly.