Band of Thebes

Wayne Koestenbaum at 192 Books

After eight years in limbo, Wayne Koestenbaum's brilliant musings Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon are back in print, and to celebrate he read to a rapt crowd last night at 192 Books in Chelsea.

Befitting the book's strand-of-pearls structure, he sampled a perfectly rounded passage from a dozen or fifteen chapters with titles like Silent Jackie, Exotic Jackie, Liz vs. Jackie, Jackie and Money, Jackie as Housewife.

The randomness of deconstructed minutiae accumulates to an unorthodox portrait not only of the most famous woman in the world and her power, but inevitably of Koestenbaum himself and his desire, as well as the layers of lost time through which he's sifting.

Begun when she was still alive, the book was originally intended as an act of diplomacy, to explain Jackie the Icon to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the person. After she died, Koestenbaum turned it into a sixty page poem addressed to her. That directness was liberating and eventually he was able to return the text to prose. He kept many lines of the poetry in tact and says he still sees the palimpsest.

Questioned afterward about camp, he said his book wasn't ironic: Yes, the voice may be gay but it is emphatically American. 

Koestenbaum wore a red tie and red eyeglass frames the same shade as the lips on Warhol's Jackie.

Born November 12: Roland Barthes

Who, in the mid-1950s, but a closeted, chain-smoking, French homosexual intellectual could look at the Abbé Pierre’s haircut and spark an essay on how personality-driven charity prevented people from seeing the root causes of poverty? Roland Barthes was among the first to bridge high and low culture, showing that absolutely anything anywhere could become a text for him to parse. In his canonical book Mythologies he closely “read” the nuances of topics as varied as wrestling, Einstein, the new Citroën, photography, toys, movies, wine vs. milk, soap vs. detergent, literature, and Garbo’s face. Because he saw so much in everyday objects, French companies tried to hire him to predict consumers’ reactions, work he flirted with then avoided. Among his seventeen books, the most praised are S/Z, his intricate study of Sarrasine by Balzac; Camera Lucida, a study of photography launched by the significance of a single photo of his beloved mother; and his essay “The Death of the Author,” about the irrelevance of writers to their work. After leaving a luncheon given by Francois Mitterrand in February 1980, Barthes was struck by a laundry truck and died one month later, age 64. Published posthumously, Incidents ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco.

The Danish Girl Now Starring Kidman and Paltrow as MTF and Wife

Readers of David Ebershoff's first novel The Danish Girl will be the luckiest members of the audience when the film adaptation is released in 2011. They will already have absorbed the true story of Einar Wegener, a Danish artist who in 1930-31 became the world's first man medically transformed into a woman, Lile Elbe. PW said of Ebershoff's book, "That it comes off triumphantly is a tribute to his taste and restraint and to the highly empathetic quality of his imagination." Although the project was originally announced with Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl), now the movie will be directed by Tomas Alfredson who rocked everyone with his Let the Right One In. The other change is worse: Charlize Theron has been replaced by Gwyneth Paltrow as Greta, the wife. Why couldn't it be Emanuelle Devos, Emmanuelle Béart, or Samantha Morton? Or even Naomi Watts here? Kidman will play Einar.

A New Literary History of America

To kill time until Larry Kramer finishes his monumental history The American People (said to be twenty years in the making and ranging from the Stone Age to the present) you can read this just published 1,128 page anthology of over 200 all new essays, A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Spanning 1507 to 2008, topics cover Spanish explorers, the Salem witch trials, and Jefferson's first inaugural address to Alcoholics Anonymous, Malcolm X, and Maya Lin. Obvious icons get their due: Huck Finn, Henry Ford, Jay Gatsby, Mickey Mouse. Essays on Melville and Henry James avoid their sexuality, but Angus Fletcher does acknowledge the homoeroticism throughout Walt Whitman's work. I read the four gay essays, each of which was particularly smart.

Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams

William J. Mann on Some Like It Hot

Maureen McLane on Adrienne Rich

Sarah Bynum on Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story

Because this is a literary history of America rather than a history of literary America, the absence of Stonewall or Aids is glaring. The ratio of essayists is more balanced but their subjects skew too male. And the index is unhelpful; it's more of a concordance. The entry for "Jews" lists exactly five pages excluding most of the Jewish authors discussed like Saul Bellow. Despite the excellent essays above, there's no entry for lesbian or gay or homosexuality or sexuality. Included, but hard to find.

You can read the editors' introduction here.

Amazon's Best 100 Books List Lacks LGBT Lives

Unfurling Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility over gay books, Amazon's editors released their list of the best 100 works of 2009 which offers only one title primarily about lgbt lives and that's a biography of the miserably married and closeted John Cheever. At number four is openly genius Colm Tóibín's superb novel Brooklyn, a straight love story set in 1950s Ireland and New York. Steig Larsson's seventh ranked Swedish crime thriller The Girl Who Played with Fire again features Mikael Blomkvist and his ex Lisbeth Salander, who this time has a girlfriend; when she's framed for three murders the media hypes her as a “psychotic lesbian SM Satanist.” In ninth place is David Small's desperately bleak graphic memoir Stitches about his botched vocal chord operation leaving him mute at fourteen under the care of his "tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding" mother, a repressed lesbian, and his doctor father who dosed him with so much radiology it gave him cancer. No doubt some lgbt characters appear in other books, but a first look at the top 100 shows a disturbing lack of titles about openly queer lives.

Amazon's Top Ten Books of 2009:

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
2. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
5. Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
6. Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival by Norman Ollstead
7. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson
8. The City & The City by China Mieville
9. Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba

Click to see the full top 100 or Amazon's 100 bestselling titles of 2009 (through October).

A.S. Byatt at the Strand

Last night at the Strand, A.S. Byatt read from her novel The Children's Book and spoke about her evolution as a novelist. Whereas she used to write "twenty or thirty drafts" when she was younger, she writes "one draft now," after strenuous concentration. She said she "might think for a week about one chapter even though I know most of what will happen." She developed her Russian doll style of text within text while writing her Booker Prize winning Possession because she was "at a period in my life when I couldn't go on with straight realism." It was her way of saying, "Look, this isn't the only way of telling a story. There are myriad ways." 

She said again that one of the seeds of this novel was her thinking about how many great writers of that golden age of young people's fiction raised children who eventually committed suicide. She remarked that two of her ruling metaphors this time were gold & silver and going underground. The name Wellwood, she admitted, was "the surgeon who saved my life."

She said using her initials rather than her given name was "more dignified and more private." She agreed with T.S. Eliot that "the writer should be impersonal."

Answering a question about whether or not her novels are pagan, she replied, "I think my novels are slightly anti-Christian, which I suppose one shouldn't say." Explaining that ever since childhood she was always more interested in the Norse gods, she said she was "not a believing pagan. In fact, I'm an unbeliever. I'm a reasonable person."

Revisiting her dust-up about adults who exclusively read Harry Potter, she said she thought J.K. Rowling was a good writer for children and her "own addiction, and it's just that, an addiction, is Terry Pratchett."

Mild spoiler alert: I asked her about Julian's shift from his obsessive attraction to other boys to his proposing to a woman. This led us to a longish discussion of Lytton Strachey, his letters, and how "they were all gay, and they all got married." She didn't feel Julian had gone straight. Coming back to it a moment later, she said, "And I think Julian still thinks he's gay."

Proving that even brilliant writers can be fallible, The Children's Book was originally titled The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare. Her next two books are a retelling of Ragnarok, the Scandinavian myth of the end of the world, and a novel about the Surrealists and the psychoanalysts.

(I love this photo by Ozier Muhammad/NYT. Last night photography was prohibited, a shame because she wore comfy red slip-on shoes.)

Scholastic Book Fairs Reverse Ban of Book with Lesbian Moms

Last week, the Scholastic school book fairs banned Lauren Myracle's Luv Ya Bunches for one of its four schoolgirl protagonists having two moms. The author agreed to clean up language such as "geez," "sucks," and "oh my god," but she refused to heterosexualize the lesbian mothers into a straight couple. Scholastic announced they would not sell the title at their book fairs because it failed "to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs," according to spokeswoman Kyle Good.

Myracle said, "A child having same-sex parents is not offensive, in my mind, and shouldn't be 'cleaned up. I find that appalling. I understand why they would want to avoid complaint letters — no one likes getting hated on — but shouldn't they be willing to evaluate the quality of the complaint? What, exactly, are children being protected against here?"

Well, Change.org took up the cause and in 48 hours collected more than 4,000 signatures demanding that Scholastic reverse their draconian policy. Yesterday, the company announced the book will appear in their spring book fairs.

Despite this happy ending, the overall principles guiding the book fairs seem confused. They still won't include the gay penguin picture book And Tango Makes Three, but they released a statement saying "we are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents." Luv Ya Bunches was always available in the Scholastic Book Club catalog, and Tango is available on Scholastic's website.

The hair-trigger touchiness is evident at the school level, too. Last year, a Vancouver, Washington school district discontinued the book fairs after one parent complained The Golden Compass was anti-Christian.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Her finest achievement since Angels & Insects and Possession, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book begins in 1895 in the V&A museum where its first spoken words are, "I said I'd show you a mystery." Although the novel overflows with perplexing objects, that first mystery is a runaway urchin, Philip Warren, who lives hiding in the museum in order to sketch its treasures. The speaker is Julian Cain, the son of the museum's director, who shows his discovery to Tom Wellwood, whose fertile mother Olive is a successful writer of children's books. How their three sprawling families interact, intermarry, and rebel, over the next twenty-five years with one another and with the Fludds, strange potters to whom Philip is apprenticed, forms the bulk of this ravishing 675-page novel. Its major themes of parenthood and childhood, the cost of storytelling and the loss of innocence, both personally and globally, inevitably culminate on WWI battlefields.

Easily traversing all class lines, in settings from London and Kent to Paris and Munich, Byatt immerses the reader in every sensation of the era. Her three dozen (!) main characters are Fabianists, capitalists, anarchists, artists, suffragists, servants, and soldiers; her historical figures include Emma Goldman, Sarah Bernhardt, J.M. Barrie, and gay icons Edward Carpenter, Rupert Brooke, and Oscar Wilde. Among her chief areas of expertise here are fairy tales, pottery, puppetry, poetry, jewelry, theater, commerce, the emancipation of women, and the primal importance of work. And the sex lives of teenagers. When vagabond Philip has a bed all to himself for the first time in his life, "He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy." Julian at 15 frankly assesses the sexual merits of Tom at 13, and still lusts after him well into college. After a long description: "He was the sort of beautiful boy, quite unconscious of his beauty, who was much discussed and courted both in Julian's prep school, and at Marlowe. Julian had asked himself whether Tom was pretty, or a possible object of passion, and had seen that, in theory, he certainly was. Pretty boys at school became rapidly self-conscious... Tom expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was." Girls' desires are treated just as naturally.

Byatt's compulsive layering of detail is excessive, yet always brilliant. Not content to dazzle readers merely with her own output, she can't stop herself from including selections of works by her characters. But it's essential to see how Olive's fairy tales steal from her children's lives. Or how the intricate narratives of the German puppet shows are pregnant with meaning in the book's broader plot. Julian's wartime poems are so good that one of them, Trench Names, was published in The New Yorker last April.

The Children's Book is an instant favorite. Treat yourself.

Gore Vidal at B&N: "Whores Have Their Own Honor"

You know he's a provocateur, a Scrooge, and a towering figure in American Letters, but did you realize Gore Vidal at 84 is still a precise mimic? Discussing his new photo memoir book Snapshots in History's Glare with Leonard Lopate on stage at Union Square's B&N last night, Vidal adroitly channeled Bush, Joe Alsop, Tennessee Williams, JFK, and Kenneth Tynan. Amid rambling memories he made these statements:

On the gushing praise from the right and the left upon Bill Buckley's death, "Whores have their own honor."

JFK complained to Vidal, "The people I meet are rich and powerful and famous but they have no interest in the country."

"The [American] empire is a total failure. And we are dead broke."

"Harry Truman decided to keep us at war forever."

Commercialism is "to do well what should not be done at all."

Warhol was "endlessly charming," Ben Hur was "dreadful," and Charlton Heston "lies that we never met, so I included this picture of us in the book. He was always strangling me with great manly hugs."

Vidal paid tribute to his partner of fifty-three years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003 and had collected most of these five hundred photos with the intention of creating this book. Some of the other photos were provided by Dick Cavett who sat in the front row with Susan Sarandon. The overflow crowd was nearly six hundred people and, remarkably, they all were good sports about Vidal not signing books after the interview.

The Hour Between by Sebastian Stuart

Sebastian Stuart freshens a familiar prep school story of senior year secrets and self-discovery with likable characters and a quick pace in his quietly insistent new novel, The Hour Between. Expelled from Collegiate, Arthur McDougal transfers to a small, alternative academy in Connecticut where he becomes best friends with Katrina Felt, the daughter of a movie star. If the mix of wealthy offspring, lost souls, drugs, sex, and Hollywood exiles sounds like Less Than Zero, don't worry; the damaged rich kids and beautiful people's mental fragility are more reminiscent of Tender Is the Night.

Emboldened by Katrina's manic glamor and outsized personality, Arthur pushes himself into his first gay affair and comes out to his sophisticated Manhattan family. His bravery is more poignant because it's 1967-68, but that era also means teenagers occasionally speak like this, "Power, baby, with a healthy dose of class rage tossed in the mix. He's a bumpkin with a chip on his shoulder the size of Elsie the cow." Even the endearingly uncertain 17 year-old Arthur sometimes lapses into language such as, "Her orgasm's ecstatic timber came crashing down the hill toward us, causing the overgrown grass itself to undulate -- the cherub's smile took on a satyr's glint." Or, "I walked down to the lake -- its surface was alive with dancing raindrops and the wet of the earth and air seemed to merge with the lake, enclosing me in a watery dream." 

Stuart, who turns 60 this year, is particularly deft in his characterizations of older women. My favorite sentence in the book is from Mrs. McDougal, who opens a scene with "Arthur, that is the most absurd idea since Bucky Fuller wanted to put a dome over Manhattan!" Katrina's mother, the smaller than expected movie star, is also perfectly drawn with a delicate understanding of actresses offscreen lost without direction. As Katrina fights to overcome past demons and auditions for the lead in a Broadway musical, the novel delivers spot-on cameo scenes with Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol.

Strict hair-splitters may be disconcerted to see a character studying Maurice early in 1968 (before Stonewall, before Forster's death) although actually the novel could not be published until 1971, posthumously. More forgiving readers should enjoy this heartfelt story of friendship and sex, coming out and growing up. Anita Shreve calls it, "charming, hilarious, effervescent, and dead serious."