Review: Man’s World by Rupert Smith
Man’s World
Rupert SmithPublished by
Arcadia Books Ltd Reviewed by Max Fincher
Man’s World, Rupert Smith’s latest novel, is a novel that explores friendship and desire between men, particularly how and where it shades into queer love. Contrasting both the 1950s and modern-day gay London, Man’s World’s highlights how society and gay life has changed dramatically, but also perhaps suggests that there are some continuities in the experience of friendship.
Michael Medway, a reserved, ‘artistic’, amateur photographer, is enduring his national service at RAF Neville in Lancashire, in 1957, and keeping a secret diary of his experiences and desires. He is befriended by another outsider who doesn’t fit in, Stephen Poynter. Stephen is openly mocked and taunted by the other men for his effeminacy and is bullied by the sexually-repressed, homophobic Sergeant Kelsey. Michael shuns Stephen’s initial attempts at friendship, afraid that he will be tarred with the same brush and be labelled a queer. Stephen acts up his flamboyant nature, cross-dressing and trying to seduce Michael by leading him into the back of a disused ambulance. Telling Michael to run away, Stephen is caught and discharged from the RAF, moving to London to work as an art director at Muscle Boy magazine. Unable to admit to his homosexuality, Michael secretly desires and fantasizes about the universally popular Mervyn Wright, the class clown and prize-winning boxer on the base. Handsome, charming, narcissistic with a Greek-god body, Wright is a jack-the-lad ‘straight-boy’ fantasy.
Taking inspiration from the models who pose in physique magazines like Health and Strength and Man’s World, Michael initially photographs Wright to promote his boxing matches. Wright asks him to take more pictures of him to help him be discovered as a body-building star in the magazines, and to realize his ambitions of working in the film industry. Wright’s enthusiasm and tactile physicality, contrasted with Michael’s quivering reticence and neurotic self-doubt, is tantalizing. The passages that describe their photographic sessions together are intensely erotic as Michael’s increasing sexual arousal is established gradually. Michael realizes that Wright really wants to have sex with him, and not the girls Wright tries to pick up when they go away together on a wild weekend in Blackpool. Back at their hotel room, drunk and frustrated, Wright asks Michael to photograph him nude:
He unlaced his shoes, pulled off his socks. His trousers fell around his ankles. He had an erection. I kept shooting....
‘How about it?’
‘What?’
‘Want a piece of the action?’
‘I...’
‘Come on,’ he said, in his gangster accent, ‘give a buddy a helping hand; He thrust his hips forward, eyes closed, lips parted.
It would all be forgotten in the morning.
I put the camera down carefully on the bed and squatted in front of him. His groin was at eye level. There was a small wet spot on the fabric of the pouch. Wright pushed closer.
I had a brief flash of clarity – I saw a dirty old man kneeling before a drunken airman in a cheap boarding house, about to take the step that would turn him from latent to practising.
It was a step from which there was no return.
I took it.’
Smith effectively portrays the power of the closet over Michael. When he visits London, Stephen tells him
: ‘You’re living a lie. You’re pretending your normal because you’re scared to death of being one of us.'
Michael and Wright eventually leave the RAF (after Michael has a spell at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, where the doctors try to cure him) and they set up home together in London through Stephen, who gets Michael a job as a photographer and introduces Wright to the influential Edward Templeton. However, Wright does not think of himself as gay, or even queer, and is no way loyal to Michael sexually, even if he loves him. We learn that throughout their relationship Wright had ‘a wandering eye. Men, women, you know – he wasn’t fussy.’
Smith has a fine ear for realistic dialogue, and he acknowledges that a number of people contributed their memories in researching the novel. In the second narrative of the story, which is set in modern-day London, Stephen appears as a wonderfully authentic character. A fiery, feisty, camp old queen whose tender sensitive spirit is still evident in his fierce protectiveness of Michael who has recently lost Wright. Stephen is unafraid to tell a few home truths to what he sees as the indifference of Michael’s young gay neighbour, Robert, who lives in the flat below him. Michael and Robert become friends, and through Michael, and Stephen, Robert discovers a lost secret world of late-1950s London, a world of high-society parties, secret bars, and police raids.
Like Michael, Robert keeps a diary, writing an online blog of his thoughts and feelings about his life and friends, and his experiences of being gay in London in 2010. In particular, Robert reflects on his friendship with Jonathan, a superficial, narcissistic, selfish drama queen:
Jonathan is my best friend, my “sister”, more like family than family, and although he’s a constant source of irritation I could never really chuck him. I like to think that we’d do anything for each other, that we’d be ‘there for you’ as they say on Friends, although if this was actually put to the test, I wouldn’t put money on the outcome.In fact, the novel explores the limits of friendship between gay men, what it means to be a good friend, and the delicate balance between putting oneself first and behaving selfishly. Robert refuses to bail out Jonathan when he gets into hot water with the grotesque pimp and drug-dealer Hadley and owes him three thousand pounds. Similarly, when Wright is charged with the murder of Gerald, a photographer who supplies pornographic photographs to high-society queen Edward Templeton and his friends, Michael begins to doubts the limits of his love for Wright:
The only person who never gets the blame is Mervyn Wright – the man who loves another man, who used his body to get him and who wasn’t averse to trading it for fame and fortune either. How much can I do for Mervyn? And what is the point? I f he gets off this time, he’s going to turn his back on me and everyone else.There is an authentic realism in Smith’s depiction of both the hidden party-world of the 1950s, and a wry observation of a certain contemporary gay world that is solely dedicated to shopping, drugs and fucking. The characters that Robert meets, particularly the rampant sex-fiend Stuart, the boy-next-door Simon at the office, Hadley, with his uber-fashionable party-set in a Shoreditch loft-conversion, are all convincing and are painted with a dry humour. There are some very funny sharp observations of character and situation, and some classic one-liners to remember: ‘...the idea of being a VIP in a sex club is like being on the guest list at the clap clinic’. When Robert goes to a contemporary art exhibition organized by Hadley, his introduction by the easily-impressed Jonathan to the self-important pretentious artist, Nicolae Vladimirescu, is very funny:
‘Hi Nico,’ says Jonathan, ‘great show.’
‘Yes,’ says Nico. ‘The creative power of the universe flows through me.’ He makes a gesture with his hands – very large, hairy-backed hands that would be more at home wrapped round a pickaxe.
‘How did you make them?’
‘It’s a very complicated process,’ he says, ‘based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. I write thesis on him at university.’
‘Wow,’ says Jonathan. ‘I did a thesis too. Mine was about...’
‘The art world at home...pffff.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Jonathan, ‘it’s so hard to get shown...’
‘So I come to England and here I find wealthy collectors.’
‘Fascinating choice of subject matter,’ I say. ‘The pigeon, for instance.’
Nico shrugs. ‘I hate fucking pigeons,’ he says, and walks off, as if mortally offended.Smith alternates each chapter between the two narratives, encouraging us to draw parallels between the respective friendships and emotional roller coasters of Michael and Wright, and Robert and Jonathan. Michael and Robert have much in common in searching for love with narcissistic personalities. They are both dominated in their friendships, even bullied into decisions by their friends that go against their better judgment. Yet at the same time, they show a strength and emotional resilience. Both are level-headed, with their feet firmly in the ground, and loyal in the face of adversity. Father-figures to their more extrovert, wild friends, both characters come to understand how their friendships shape their lives, and for Robert, that friendship can cross the generation gap. He comes to realize that it’s all been said, felt and done before.
Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world. Labels: Review
Review: Intersex (for lack of a better word)
Intersex (for lack of a better word)
Thea HillmanPublished by
Manic D PressReviewed by Sophie Mayer
“I believe in speaking to people in a language they’ll understand. I’ve got CAH [congenital adrenal hyperplasia] when I talk to doctors; I’m intersex when I talk to activists; I’ve got a medical condition when I talk to my boss.” (“Condition,” 148)
What about when Thea Hillman talks to her audience – whether live or reading? Intersex (for lack of a better word) is a story of, literally, coming to terms (or, better, defining one’s own terms rather than being defined by someone else’s), first with a childhood diagnosis of CAH, then through her own shifting gender and sexual identities, and continuously with perceptions both within and outside her social worlds of family, friends and, increasingly, the interlocking sex-radical/queer/trans/intersex communities of the Bay Area. Intersex, far from being a three-act Hollywood melodrama of finding (or accepting) oneself/falling in love/reuniting with family/triumphing over (or through) the medical establishment/insert autobiographical cliché here, is a radical adventure through narrative instability and the erotics of constant redefinition.
Told in fragments each titled by, and circling around, a single word (starting with “Haircut” and ending with “C/leaving”), Intersex is an openwork text full of better words that – as Hillman suggests – speak vividly to different listeners of subjective and social experiences around the slippage, claiming and shifting of identity. Pieces such as “Opinion” (an op-ed on Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex) and “Already” (a scorching erotic encounter) differently but consistently apply careful pressure to the word intersex as a portmanteau that contains “a bunch of people who have a variety of bodies, some radically different from each other, and even more different experiences” (148).
So, for lack of a better word, the book could have been called Human. There’s something for everyone here: family Christmases and sex parties rub up alongside each other provocatively; school bullies and shit bosses are seen off, years – but only pages – later, by activist community; the ordinary misery of break-ups mingles with the extraordinary trauma of invasive medical encounters. The second half of the book, in pieces like “Allies,” “Out,” and “Community,” explore the tension between waving intersex aloft as a banner under which a community can gather in order to educate and create change, and its inexactness.
That inexactness creates the space for Intersex: for its tapestry of individual, contradictory, telling details that, told with such precision and care, texture a life (Gram’s Alzheimer’s, the anal fins of mosquito fish, Queeruption), and for Hillman’s ability to combine skilfully the telling of a tale and the revelation of its import, not only for people living sex and gender differently, but for what those experiences might bring to the political sphere at large.
In “War,” Hillman writes: “Being in love is the opposite of being at war… I take the war on terror personally because the war on terror is really a war on difference, because my body strikes terror in the hearts of other Americans. My body and the bodies of the people I love are the most intimate sites of American imperialism” (95-96). Thea Hillman is who we need in the battle for hearts and minds.
Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/Labels: Review
Review drop, anchor by Ben Barton
drop, anchor
Ben BartonPublished by
erbacce-pressReviewed by Eric Karl Anderson
Ben Barton’s poems construct a portrait of an individual starting from birth through the course of life encountering lovers and enduring the death of family members. There is an immediate sense of the fragility of life in the opening poem ‘The Re-Birth Remembered’ which describes how the narrator was born alongside a twin who was still born. That one should be taken home to be swaddled and loved while the other is shut in the dark and buried, their fates decided by trivial chance, seems an intolerable injustice that makes the narrator demand that they both be remembered.
These restrained poems don’t strive for deeper meaning because the profundity is there in the situation or encounter. Each is charged with an emotion refracted through a snapshot of a particular situation. From ecstatic bliss “ten thousand sparklers went off in my head” to the pulsing everydayness of desire “I like to watch the men’s crotches bobbing with the tarmac bumps,” the grave humour of hiding from landlords demanding money “too scared, even to piss in the centre of the bowl” and the bitterness of loss/missed opportunities “Another year has passed without you here.” These poems create feelings which resonate and an ambiguity about the choices one should make.
Ben Barton
Civil partnerships don’t necessarily make gay domestic harmony just because a contract has been signed. Although no one actually believes making a life-long commitment instantly resolves all those messy relationship problems (what David McConnell refers to as the “enchanted bed” of marriage), there is a buoyancy of feeling and vague expectation of unanimity between partners caused from legal reform which allows same sex couples to experience something akin to marriage. The happy gay home is called into question in the poem ‘Pink House.’ Small seemingly trivial arguments can erupt into bigger issues and it ends with the heavily ironic thought “Homo sweet homo.”
Like the final poem which describes a casual encounter: “It’s time to go home I guess,” the reader is left with a sense of longing for more. With a new book of poetry and a string of super 8 films in production the prolific poet/film-maker Ben Barton doesn’t seem to be slowing down. See http://roundeyebooks.blogspot.com/ for current events and projects.
Labels: Poetry Review
Review: The Phoenix by Ruth Sims
The Phoenix
by
Ruth Sims
Published by
Lethe Press
Reviewed by
Liam TullbergThe Phoenix is a richly-written Victorian saga that explores the lengths one will go to for true love.
At the heart of the novel is Jack Rourke, a strong-willed, morally-malleable young man destined to escape his impoverished and abusive homelife. The death of his sickly twin, Michael, at an early age ignites a fury in Jack that leads him to murder his cruel, tyrannical father. On the run, he disappears into the winding streets of London and soon finds the home and family he never had in the local theatre where, with the help of kindly Lizbet, he is reborn as Kit St. Denys.
When an accident on stage brings Dr Nicholas Stuart into Kit’s life, the attraction for both men is immediate and, despite themselves, they are irreversibly drawn together, their stark contrasts the ground on which their relationship is built; Kit gregarious and creative, Nicholas withdrawn and logical. Their affair appears doomed from the start, their inner conflicts as strong as those around them in a society in which homosexuality could lead to imprisonment and social exile. Sims writes these issues with compassion and clarity, not allowing historical fact to slow or impend upon the engagement and enjoyment of fiction.
While Jack is clearly the protagonist of The Phoenix, Sims has created a truly empathetic, plausible character in the initially arid, insular Nicholas. Introduced through his fervently religious family, Nicholas’s cold character thaws out on every page and he is a character with whom one wills Kit to share his life. His wife, Brownlyn, is also written with tenderness and not allowed to become the caricature harpy that would no doubt have made the reader’s emotions towards her two-dimensional at best.
Throughout the novel, it’s clear to see that, for both Kit and Nicholas, the bond of family is near-impossible to break. Kit cannot shake the feeling that, as his father had always told him, he is worthy of nothing, and Nicholas is forever bound by the guilt born of his family’s religion. It is within these flaws that their love and need for one another grows and the novel reaches a dramatic, unforgettable ending.
The Phoenix is an engaging and exciting read that is written with enough historical detail to create a picture in the readers’ mind’s eye, but not so much as to distract from the excellent characters and winding plot. Likewise, the dialogue feels true to the period, but is not cumbersome or difficult to manage.
While the story of The Phoenix may be set in the late 19th Century, it’s one of love, lust and loss that is as pertinent as present day tales. Each of us has our demons and it is how we exorcise them that tells the truth about our character.
Liam Tullberg is a Bristol-based author currently working on his novel, From the Darkness, and can be contacted through www.liamtullberg.comLabels: Review
Film Review: All Over Me
All Over Me
dir. Alex Sichel
Peccadillo Pictures DVD
Reviewed by Sophie Mayer
In her autobio-stage show Paradoxical Undressing, Kristin Hersh tells the story of an early show with Throwing Muses, the band she put together with her sister Tanya Donnelly when they were still in high school in the early 1980s. Coming offstage after playing a spot in a punk show, the band encountered a fan who asked, “What did you say your band name is? Throwing Up Mucus?” There’s a gulf between what he thought he heard with his punk ears on and the nascent riot grrrl protest of the band’s actual name – but there’s also a truth. Riot grrrl, inspired by punk and feminist performance art in equal measures, threw the concept of the muse out the window with songs that often threw bodily fluids and processes in audience’s faces; metaphorically, for the most part, although Donita Sparks from L7 did throw a bloody tampon into the crowd at Reading in 1992. Embodiment, angst, rage, wild emotion: all those things girls were supposed to keep under wraps burned through in the long hot summers after the ’87 crash.
Riding the crest of riot grrrl, All Over Me brings feminist protest and adolescent vomit in equal measures as it plunges the viewer into the woozy world of Hell’s Kitchen summer with fifteen year olds Claudia (Alison Folland, who popped up in I’m Not There alongside Kim Gordon), known as Claude, and Ellen (Tara Subkoff, a New York hipster who’s in We Live in Public). They’re trying to form their own band, inspired by Helium (lead singer Mary Timony appears in the film as a member of the comedically-named grrrl band CoochiePop), Patti Smith, Babes in Toyland, and Sleater Kinney, who all appear on the soundtrack. Ellen’s a little distracted by neighbourhood bad boy Mark (Cole Hauser, who went on to play tough in the Riddick films and K-Ville), while Claude’s a little distracted by Ellen’s distraction. While Ellen goes boy-crazy (literally, as Mark turns her on to coke and booze), Claude finds herself drawn to pink-haired guitarist Lucy (Leisha Hailey, who grew up to become Alice on The L Word). What seems like a classic love triangle is given edge and dimension when Mark is unsettled by Claude’s new neighbour, Luke (Pat Briggs, lead singer of Psychotica), a queer musician who has befriended Claude’s shy workmate Jesse (Wilson Cruz, aka Ricky from My So Called Life).
Hello? How have you not bought the DVD already? Riot grrrl, Wilson Cruz, Leisha Hailey with pink hair, and thanks to Lisa Cholodenko and Maria Maggenti in the credits… As if that’s not enough, Sylvia Sichel pens dialogue that sounds, yknow, how actual teenagers, like, speak or whatever, while her sister Alex keeps the camera intimate and mobile, like a more chilled-out Spike Lee joint. Unlike the Campion sisters, they weren’t able to sustain their filmmaking partnership, only creating this jewel of a film. Maybe that’s because it’s so of its time and place: a time when grrrls could do anything and everyone pitched in to help. Maybe it’s just me (I’m listening to Helium as I write this) but somehow All Over Me’s timeliness is also its timelessness, in the way that the music brings the swirl of adolescent feeling to the surface.
This is the ur-queer film, way more so (and way less pretentious) than Go Fish – and possibly the only film ever to catch the moment of infinite possibility that was mid-nineties riot grrrl, capturing how it felt to be bouncing up and down in a club full of grrrls in ripped jeans and home-cut hair, comparing guitar licks with boys wearing nail varnish. Claude might be broke, but she has an electric guitar, roller skates, Patti Smith on CD, and a paintbox. Long before Naomi was dreaming of Emily to the strains of Sleater Kinney on Skins, the Sichel Sisters (director Alex and writer Sylvia) were doing it for themselves, setting queer teenage hearts aflame with a film that’s part love story, part rocking soundtrack and all heart. These girls rule!
Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/Labels: Film Review
Queer Books of 2009
Queer Books of 2009
A large number of fantastic new queer books were published in 2009 - too many for us to cover in the blog. Best-selling queer authors like Colm Toibin (Brooklyn) and Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger) published impressive novels without any overt queer themes. Bright new talent like Vestal McIntyre (
Lake Overturn) and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly) published novels which tread new territory previously unexplored in queer fiction. Rakesh Satyal (
Blue Boy) and Abdellah Taia (
Salvation Army) breathed new life into the coming of age novel with spectacular debuts. G. Winston James (
Shaming the Devil) and Jameson Currier (
Still Dancing) published varied and startling collections of short stories.
Edmund White and
David Plante published memoirs that shed new light on queer experience. With fresh and savy growing publishers like
Alyson,
Red Bone Press,
Lethe Press and
Young Offenders Media giving burgeoning queer talent a voice, there will be plenty of new queer literature to look forward to in the new year.
For a more comprehensive look at what queer writers have been reading over the past year, the informative and well-maintained blog
Band of Thebes has gathered an impressive array of 56 queer writers to give their 2009 recommendations. Click
here to read the list.
Labels: Queer Books of 2009
Review: Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Edited by Steve Berman
Published by
Lethe PressReviewed by Paul Kane
These eleven stories display a match made in heaven and, on occasion, consummated in hell: speculative / slipstream literature conflated with a queer/LGBT sensibility. Joel Lane’s Behind the Curtain, a skewered take on the vampire tale, is a case in point. Set amid a landscape of urban decay and environmental collapse, it has a protagonist intent on cruising for a bruising; or a bloodletting, anyway. Vampire romance, as a genre, is all the rage with adolescent girls at the minute; this story is a more carnal version of the form.
The most impressive piece of fiction is AKA St. Mark’s Place by Richard Bowes, though the ending is a bit perfunctory, mind. In essence, the story traces the relationship between three troubled souls - Judy, Ray and BD - from the mid-'60s to the early 1970s. Their relationship, a tangle of fate, is not so much a love triangle as a triangle of intimate complicity; and the most effective passages evoke the frisson of feeling that occurs when you notice properly who people are, how they see themselves. The clairvoyant element here adds a layer of mystery, but does not dispel the gloom of two take-home truths: families are ramshackle dwellings, unstable and insecure, is one; another: the abused will somehow tend to become abusers.
Another highlight of the collection is a tale entitled Bluff, by that formidably accomplished writer, L.A. Fields. His contribution touches on lust, longing, a little death (in the Elizabethan sense, natch) and maybe the larger one. Though a small example of what he can do, it is effective nonetheless.
Finally, to end, comments on a couple of other contributions. I’m Your Violence by Lee Thomas starts out as a police procedural in the vein of James Ellroy: a grisly sex murder, the leading turn an act of near-cannibalism. It then veers off in a weird (or an even weirder) direction but a fruitful one, with an interesting moral ambivalence at its core. As a writer, Thomas is a real find and his protagonist here, a detective by the name of Dean Kaiser, is surely too intriguing a character to be limited to a run-out in just one story. Echo by Peter Dube is different again, having a thread of subtle disquiet which evokes that dark genius Thomas Ligotti, or some of the rare fictions of Guy Davenport. It seemed to tell of a curious fate, yet was as much a meditation on memory and lost time. A strange, suggestive story.
Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.comLabels: Anthology, Review
Review: Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
Edited by Richard Canning
Published by
Alyson Books
Reviewed by Max Fincher
‘Must read’ or ‘must do’ lists rouse my hackles, initially at least. My immediate feeling is: ‘Why must I?’ Why should I read this or that book in preference to another? Or one I have chosen to read or had recommended to me? It is similar to the mixed feelings you might experience being told to read certain ‘classic’ works of fiction at college or university, because they are somehow inherently ‘good for you’. We all know what is good for us (sometimes we even enjoy it) but we don’t always necessarily want to be good all the time. However, this collection of essays in no way attempts to persuade you why you must read these books along the arguments of their literariness, popularity or for self-improvement reasons; in fact, one or two of the essays argue against reading their choice. Instead, the reader is given very personal reflections by the contributors on the pleasures they have yet to discover. After putting off reading Moby Dick for years, I might now try reading the novel, as well as revisiting again, with a better understanding, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.
So Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read ‘...isn’t a canonical book’. As Richard Canning makes clear in his introduction, there is no overarching grand narrative that links the selections together according to some linear, developmental history. The range of books covered is not merely limited to novels either. Letters, diaries, poetry, and autobiography are included, and the essays span Plato, Gilgamesh and the Bible to contemporary fiction by Herve Guibert, Rebecca Brown and Matthew Sadler. This is not intended to be a comprehensive survey or history of gay literature in the manner of say Gregory Woods’s A History of Gay Literature, but is a highly subjective and personal choice of works by both new and established contemporary writers. There are gaps and holes between writers and periods and ‘the babble of gathered voices’, gaps that we can fill in if we choose. Inevitably, everyone will have their own ‘must read’ list. But as Canning says to focus on who is left out is to miss the point: ‘the value of this book not by what isn’t here, but by what is’ (p.xiv).
And for some readers there may be surprising omissions. Forster, Gide, Genet, Joe Orton, Armistead Maupin, Alan Hollingshurst and Sarah Waters are all absent. One aspect of this collection that makes it immensely readable and enjoyable, is that the essays are not consistently in the vein of classic biographical or literary-critical appreciations. Instead, many contributors offer subjective viewpoints, reminiscences and musings on the process of reading, the writers or describe how certain characters changed or affected them personally. Many essays read against established interpretations. For instance Robert Glück’s reads Edmund White’s, A Boy’s Own Story as a transgressive piece of fiction that argues against reading the novel as an example of ‘crossover’ literature with mainstream audiences. Regina Marler admits she doesn’t like Henry James’s The Bostonians, finding James’s characterisation of the latent lesbian attraction between the characters of Olive and Verena ‘mean-spirited’, ‘spiteful’ and ‘grotesque’.
Frequently, the essays are stylistically inventive, as in Kathy Acker’s appreciation of the fiction of William Burroughs. In addition, there are exciting cross-currents occurring between readers and writers, where sexuality is not a centrifugal point: straight and lesbian women read gay men’s writing, and (previously straight) and gay/bisexual men read straight women’s fiction. The essay by Mark Behr on The Color Purple is a shining example, and shows the power of fiction to both transform and connect people.
Herman Melville
Out of the fifty books chosen, I have read six: Horace Walpole’s Letters (only selections; reading all thirty-four volumes would take forever); Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. For my Christmas holiday reading, I decided I would choose five books to read. Vestal McIntyre’s description of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as ‘...a story bursting at its seams, assembled and sewn together as roughly as Frankenstein’s monster’ and Melville’s daring, experimental language intrigues me. I have shied away from modernist fiction, but perhaps Melville will engage me. Second on my list is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Edmund White describes how Yourcenar’s had an unconventional upbringing, tutored by her father in Latin and Greek, and how she is ‘a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture’. I am hoping to discover a brilliant historical fiction writer, to see how she portrays ‘one of the great same-sex love stories of all time’. Thirdly, I would like to read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. David Bergman has whetted my interest by describing Ginsberg’s curious mix of spirituality and explicit sexuality, his inclusive and embracing attitude to other people, and how the experience of reading his poems is like ‘holding the book and holding the man’. J.R. Ackerley’s autobiography, My Father and Myself, is, according to Andrew Holleran, ‘a wonderful comic portrait of people with an almost Dickensian cast’. I am anticipating from Holleran’s description something in the realm of Alan Bennett’s wonderfully observant character-sketches, Talking Heads, mixed with Kenneth Williams’ diary. Holleran’s description of Ackerley as ‘entertaining’, ‘acerbic’ and ‘never boring or monotonous’, suggests a pleasurable journey of exploration of a complex man’s relationship with his father and his own sexual feelings. Finally, I would like to read Andrew Holleran’s own novel, Dancer from the Dance, to submerge and lose myself in a heady era of ‘intense artifice’, the disco moment of the 1970s, and to discover perhaps the ‘first real novel of Gay Liberation’, which as Matias Viegener says is ‘a wild and unexpected fulfilment of Walt Whitman’s utopian call for the “love of comrades” to “sing the body electric”.
Reading the essays in this collection has opened my eyes to the diversity of voices and his(her)stories that are out there for us all to explore and experience. You may find your assumptions and expectations about a particular work or writer confirmed or overturned, but hopefully you will make new discoveries. I am hoping my own selections will be entertaining, challenging and informative, and that each will contain something that, in some small or large way, changes my own ‘certainties’. To this end, I would like to conclude with a quotation from Mark Behr’s essay on The Color Purple, as a coda for why everyone must read:
The Reader doubts, often. From book to book, his doubts multiply. The Reader believes that if more people were less certain more often, and tasted the emancipation that comes with doubt, there would be fewer wars and fewer hungry and unhappy and angry people in whose eyes he sees himself reflected.
Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.Labels: Anthology, Review
Review: Ganymede Stories One
Ganymede Stories One
edited by John Stahle
Published by
GanymedeReviewed by Marc Bridle
This anthology brings together short stories published in the first six issues of Ganymede; and like all anthologies it is a hit-and-miss affair. But what sets it above many similar collections is both the quality of the writing and the audacity of its editors in establishing a new gay literary benchmark for anthologies of this kind. The (mostly) contemporary prose in these 200 pages is seen squarely in the context of a Nineteenth Century aesthetic, one that stretches from the horse-drawn hansoms of gas-lit London to the bloodshot-eyed edginess of modern day San Francisco and Paris.
From Andrew J. Peters’ adorably amusing gay fairytale, The Vain Prince, to Cyrus Cassells’ aphoristic Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch established principles of prose are overturned. Peters’ fairytale anti-hero, Adalbert, is rather like a queer Turandot, and his prose swaggers along like a drunken queen in a nightclub, the very antithesis of what a fairytale should be. The opposite are Cassells’ exquisitely drawn short paragraphs, dexterously poetic and dripping in color like a golden-tongued seraphim. Elsewhere you can clearly see an individual writer’s non-literary influences. B.R.Lyon’s As is, I aspires to the condition of music, as does Marc Andreottola’s Lots. What sets Andreottola’s story apart from others here is the filmic quality he brings to his narrative. Just as a filmmaker can focus on one image and make the viewer seem unsettled so does Andreottola: “All the entertainer could see was the thigh of the Stump, a strong meaty thigh. The thigh activated the entertainer somehow, like a switch. He felt like the thighs could crush him like a nutcracker.” On a completely different level, John Stahl’s brilliantly articulated Memories of Inexpression shows that evocative writing doesn’t need to be a dialogue. With Beckett-like precision Stahl’s prose bears the imprint of isolation and memory like few other pieces in this anthology.
Gay writing is universal and it is, therefore, good to see the Ljubljana-based writer Boris Pintar included in this anthology. Slavic Thicket: Two Stories, translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau, is coruscating. Whether by design or by translation his writing positively reeks of scents; pissing is not so much about the act as it is about the smell. In fact, this is prose that assails the senses in every way: cocks are eye-balled, sniffed and licked; nostrils are there not just to smell the aphrodisiac of sex but to snort coke, poppers and glue. Paragraphs are long – but never over long – but their very tightness leaves one feeling rather as if one has been clubbed over the head. They are brutal. The only other story which comes close to this kind of semi-pornographic wasteland of spunk and hard fucks is Eric Karl Anderson’s Beauty Number Two.
There used to be a time when gay literature had one ubiquitous theme: HIV and AIDS (think especially of the works of Hervé Guibert or David Wojnarowicz) so it was astonishing to find that the acronym HIV appears twice and AIDS just once in this entire anthology, and even then in just one story: Beauty Number Two. Anderson is certainly neither quixotic nor passive about it (“I’ve had enough of this fucking AIDS death camp”) but neither is he remote from it (“He is HIV positive: each revelatory fact makes him more perfect in my fevered imagination”). And jostling with the poetry of Anderson’s prose is a veritable shopping list of modern-day triviality, from celebrity blow-jobs to branded underwear, all neatly bound together in a very Noughties framework of queer happiness.
Cyrus Cassells
Which is, I suppose, what Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson might have been doing in the Nineteenth century. The inclusion of works by Wilde and Stevenson, taking up a full quarter of the pages here, strikes me as problematical, though it does underline the extent to which some recent gay writing has retrenched to a more inverted form of beauty. Neither author could be said to be a model for Dennis Cooper’s anti-queer deviancy, but I can see the partial influence of their aesthetic on some of the writers appearing earlier on in this collection. Stevenson’s The Adventure of the Hansom Cab is indeed evocative, but its links to anything gay are tenuous. It reminds me more of the subtle homoeroticism of a Mapplethorpe still life. Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is more semi-comic than semi-erotic; it’s inclusion based on the assumption that it is a rarity amongst Oscar Wilde’s prose works is, I think, unfounded.
Nevertheless, their prominence in this collection doesn’t detract from the sheer overall quality of the writing elsewhere, which is uniformly of a high standard. The sharp-edged writing of these authors might have benefited from equally sharp writing to stand beside them – perhaps some Samuel R Delaney (unfamiliar to many, even in North America) or a translation of some of Pierre Guyotat’s Prostitution, for example. Production values are high, and similar in style to Ganymede’s quarterly journal. Lavish black and white photographs are interspersed throughout, including some of the authors - who tend for the most part to be an attractive bunch. A perfect stocking filler – or as Marc Andreottola might have put it in his story a “dirty black sock” filler.
Marc Bridle is a critic and writer. He is based in Vancouver and London.
Labels: Anthology, Review
Review: The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love
The Cinema of Sally Potter
By Sophie Mayer
Published by
WallFlower PressReviewed by Dr Kate Ince
Despite the wide coverage Sally Potter’s films have received since her early experimental shorts and Thriller in 1979, Sophie Mayer’s The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is only the second full-length study of Potter’s career. It has arrived at almost the same moment as Potter’s sixth full-length feature Rage, which is no coincidence, since Mayer explains that her book was delayed by the announcement, during the summer of 2008, that Rage was complete and would be screening at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. She has undoubtedly risen to the ‘exhilarating, if unnerving challenge’ (p.9) of weaving the film into her manuscript in limited time, though was aided in this (as in many areas) by interviews with Potter and contact with Potter’s production company, Adventure Pictures.
The dynamism and sheer energy of Potter’s 1970s work in performance, dance and Expanded Cinema (as well as of her career as a whole) has influenced the structure of Mayer’s book, whose fourteen sections alternate between close commentary and analysis of Potter’s six features and eight chapters named after the activities of Working, Moving, Colouring, Listening, Feeling, Loving and Becoming. The active force of these present participles matches and draws on the passionately positive kind of change and transformation to be found in so many of Potter’s narratives, encapsulated by critic Jackie Hatfield’s description of what the existential was for the ‘synesthetic, sensuous, experiential, live and time-based art called expanded cinema’, ‘a kind of becoming: for the artist through process, and for the audience through reception’ (p.77). Issues of sensuous experience and the effect on viewers’ bodies of films’ sensuality have been uppermost in critical writing about cinema during the 2000s, since the appearance of Laura Marks’ The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000), and although Mayer’s book impresses more by the range of sources it draws upon than by their connectedness to one another, and she perhaps resorts after only a short while to using Marks’ key term ‘haptic’ rather loosely, she convincingly brings out Potter’s affinity with the existential-phenomenological notion of the ‘lived body’, as shown in a remark about how, in The Man Who Cried, Suzie’s songs resonate with the viewer’s bodily movements and gestures though an ‘associative “empathy”’ (p.148), and in her observation of ‘two contrasting strategies that ‘touch’ us haptically [in Potter’s films]: firstly, how performers use their bodies in ways that carry over from her live work; and secondly, her use of film forms such as the close-up and rhythmic editing shows us these bodies in motion’ (p.6). Mayer also picks up on the feminism implicit in this haptic visuality and pervasive embrace of sensuous experience, and particularly well when she defends Potter against the many criticisms made of her decision to play the fictional character ‘Sally’ of The Tango Lesson herself, by acknowledging that this choice stemmed from a certain narcissism, but insisting that ‘Potter and her eponymous character lay claim to a bodily autonomy and pleasure that confused male reviewers who ‘conflate[d] female autonomy and authorship with narcissism’’ (p.20).
The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is a lengthy book, in which Mayer sometimes seems to get so engrossed in her material that she forgets Potter altogether (for example when discussing colour in film on pp.106-7). More judicious editing might have been advisable, as well as some reinforcement of argumentation: although the latter is strong and convincing in ‘Listening’, it is much weaker in the Thriller chapter and some others. More than a touch of romanticization of bodily labour is detectable in ‘Working’, where Mayer describes labour as ‘graceful and received with gratitude’ (p.50), and picks out ‘work’s grace’ as a ‘revolutionary gesture’ (p.42). She can also be much less idealising about the positivity of Potter’s filmmaking, however, as in ‘Moving’, where she suggests the relevance to Potter’s work of the ‘truly ethical apprehension of beauty’ theorised by Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just (2006) (p.82). She deploys Maria Lugones’ notion of ‘world-travelling’ so suited to the international wanderings of Potter’s characters carefully, specifying that it is used by Lugones to mean travelling ‘into others’ worlds through performance’ (p.89) rather than any more literal tourist-style journeying. And there is nothing saccharine about the thesis of a ‘politics of love’ included in the book’s title, which Mayer seems to have developed from theorist of the postcolonial Michael Hardt, who is quoted asserting the centrality of ‘this political character’ to premodern notions of love such as Christian and Judaic notions of ‘a constitution of the community’ (p.25). There is no disguising that Mayer’s book is as much a deeply personal appreciation of Potter’s work and career as it is an academic study, but Mayer avows as much early on when she describes the transformative experience viewing Orlando at the age of fifteen was for her, and explains that her book is ‘about an ‘inner exchange’ between one viewer and the films’. Her book is obviously just as much a labour of love as Potter’s films, and she gives eloquent testimony to the ‘giant leap’ she feels responding to them to be, a leap into a shared and immersive space of fantasy (p.70). The most important reason for the greatness of Sally Potter’s cinema, she is ultimately arguing, is that it requires and teaches us to look in a new way, with a ‘loving eye’ (p.135) that encourages and instils a mutual regard between seer and seen. To look upon someone or something is no detached, disinterested activity, but a transformative and enabling act that can, to quote Celeste from The Gold Diggers, ‘chang[e] what is there’ (p.238).
Dr Kate Ince is Reader in French Film and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham.Labels: Review
Man’s World
