OutWrite 2022 is now on YouTube

Did you miss this past weekend's OutWrite 2022 Literary Festival, sponsored by the DC Center? No problem! You can now view all the sessions at your leisure via YouTube. And you can still support OutWrite 2022 authors by buying their books.  

Bookstores, (L)ittle and big

Washingtonian magazine recently compiled a list of "21 Independent Bookstores to Browse in the D.C. Area." It's a useful roundup, which includes several local purveyors of fine literature I didn't know about. But thanks to our friend Mark Osele, who recently shopped there, I see that it inexplicably omits Little District Books, which bills itself as "A Celebration of LGBTQIA+ Authors and Stories." Located on Barracks Row at 737 8th St. SE, it sounds quite promising, so I plan to check it out for myself soon. 

Update: Washingtonian has just rectified its sin of omission by interviewing Little District's founder, Patrick Kern. (A tip of the hat to Octavio Roca for alerting me to that.)

Come to OutWrite 2022! 🌈

The 12th annual OutWrite Literary Festival, sponsored by the DC Center, happens this coming weekend (Aug. 5-7). The virtual event features 70 LGBTQ+ authors and lots of readings, panels and workshops. Use this link to view the full schedule and register for livestreams; all events are free and open to the public. You can also support OutWrite 2022 authors by buying their books.  

Update: Our very own Vincent Slatt will be on the Rainbow History Project's "Power of Story" panel on Sunday, Aug. 7, at 1 p.m., interviewing local author Jill Strachan.

Have (Thom) Gunn, Will Travel...

It's been quite a while since our group went through its Thom Gunn groupie phase, reading Boss Cupid in 2008 and The Man with Night Sweats the following year. (We've also encountered several of his poems in various collections over the years.) But a recent New Republic essay by Jeremy Lybarger, "Thom Gunn's Anti-Confessional Poetry," has renewed my interest in Gunn's work. If you're not yet familiar with the poet, do yourself a favor and read this crisp overview of his life and work--and then order one of his collections. Even if you are already a fan, I predict you'll find new nuggets to savor in Lybarger's sympathetic yet probing portrait of a complex artist.

Advice on consent

During last Wednesday's very well-attended (14 guys!) Zoom discussion of Puerilities, Daryl Hine's translation of poems from the notorious 12th Book of the Greek Anthology, Mike Mazza shared a couple of items in the chat box regarding consent that I wanted to memorialize here. The first is Taking Liberties: Gay Men's Essays on Politics, Culture and Sex (1996), edited by Michael Bronski; the second is a 2010 BBC report on "The sexually abused dancing boys of Afghanistan" by Rustam Qobil. I'd add that Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, also features that fraught topic as a major element. (A movie based on the novel was released in 2007, and a theatrical adaptation just debuted on Broadway.) 

The origin story of "Puerilities"

Patrick Flynn, who nominated and will lead our upcoming discussion of Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of the Greek Anthology, translated by Daryl Hine, was kind enough to share the following info, excerpted from Wikipedia:

"In 1606 or 1607 Claudius Salmasius discovered, in the library of the Counts Palatine in Heidelberg, the only surviving copy of [Constantine] Cephalas' early [ca. 950 CE] unexpurgated copy of the Greek Anthology. This included the 258-poem anthology of homoerotic verse by Straton of Sardis [early 2nd century CE] that would eventually become known as the notorious Book 12 of that collection. It was copied and circulated by hand and first published in 1776. Some 225 more years would pass before a full Greek-to-English translation was issued."

 

A "Specimen Days" spoiler alert...

A tip of the hat to Jeremy Coats, who alerted me to the following tidbit in a 2005 eAudio interview with Specimen Days author Michael Cunningham: The bowl is a book (he didn't want to be too literal (!).