Band of Thebes

Zadie Smith on E.M. Forster and His BBC Radio Talks

Check out Zadie Smith's long, smart essay on Forster in the current New York Review of Books. Here's the second paragraph, which reflects the tone throughout:

Still, like all notable English novelists, he was a tricky bugger. He made a faith of personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness. He was an Edwardian among Modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class, education, and race—a progressive among conservatives. Suburban and parochial, his vistas stretched far into the East. A passionate defender of "Love, the beloved republic," he nevertheless persisted in keeping his own loves secret, long after the laws that had prohibited honesty were gone. Between the bold and the tame, the brave and the cowardly, the engaged and the complacent, Forster walked the middling line.

Smith's theme of Forster's middlebrow stature is a constant in this review of a collection of his BBC talks just published by the University of Missouri Press. She quotes his letter about Flaubert with its not so odd verb from a century ago, then she repeats it:

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing.... This is my "theory," and I maintain it's sentimental—at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

To his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E.M. Forster is proof that when it comes to aesthetics, one had really better be fagged: the zeal of the fanatic is what's required. "E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot," thought Katherine Mansfield, a fanatic if ever there was one.

Although Smith never hints why, if he was so middling, she wanted to model her recent novel On Beauty on his Howard's End, she does affirm his central course:

Forster's novels are full of people who'd think twice before borrowing a Forster novel from the library. Well—they'd want to know—is it worth the bother or not? Neither intellectuals nor philistines, they are the kind to "know what they like" and have the "courage of their convictions," though their convictions are not entirely their own and their courage mostly fear. They are capable of cruelty born of laziness, but also of an unexpected spiritual greatness, born of love. The right book at the right moment might change everything for them (Forster only gave the credence of certainty to love). It's worth thinking of these cautious English souls, with their various potential for greatness and shabbiness, love and spite, as Forster's radio audience: it makes his approach comprehensible.

Think of Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, settled by their Bakelite radio waiting for the latest installment of Some Books. Maurice, thanks to his superior education, catches the literary references but, in his suburban slowness, misses much of the spirit. Alec, not having read Wordsworth, yet grasps the soul of that poet as he listens to Forster recount a visit to the Lake District, Wordsworth country:

    Grey sheets of rain trailed in front of the mountains, waterfalls slid down them and shone in the sun, and the sky was always sending shafts of light into the valleys.

Early on, Forster voiced his determination to plow the middle course:

    I've had nice letters from people regretting that my talks are above them, and others equally nice regretting that they are below; so hadn't I better pursue the even tenor of my way?

Well, hadn't he?

Read the essay, and if you have sixty dollars, buy the book, which sounds essential in its modest way.

Born July 31: Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings deserves a biographer, a feature film like Kinsey, and a national holiday. She was heroic at least since her freshman year at Northwestern (1949-50), when a Chicago psychiatrist proposed to "cure" her lesbianism and, rather than submit, or fall apart, Gittings devoted all her time to studying homosexuality in the medical and legal libraries. The dreadful descriptions ("deviate," "pervert"), the exclusively male focus, and the lack of any mention of love only spurred her on. Typical gusto: When she found the anonymously written book The Homosexual in America, she called the publisher to find out who the author was and arranged to meet him. Later, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in California, and within two years she had begun a New York chapter despite living in Philadelphia. She edited the group's magazine, The Ladder, and became friends with Frank Kameny in Washington. Together they organized the phenomenal picketing of the White House in October 1965 and at Independence Hall, where Gittings carried a sign reading Homosexuals Demand Their Civil RIghts. She and Kameny were instrumental in convincing the APA to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. With her life partner, Kay Lahusen, whom she met at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, she never stopped working for gay equality. Several awards are named in her honor, including one from GLAAD. There should be more.

Booker Longlist: Yes Philip Hensher, No Adam Mars-Jones

The Man Booker Prize judges released their longlist yesterday. One of the thirteen titles is a massive 736 page novel of the 1970s, The Northern Clemency by out novelist and critic Philip Hensher. But the list omits Adam Mars-Jones' Pilcrow, the 544 page first volume of a trilogy about a disabled gay teenager in 1950s. Mars-Jones isn't even mentioned in the articles about the list's glaring absentees, which predictably concentrate on Peter Carey, Hanif Kureishi, and Doris Lessing. According to the Guardian, Booker winner A.S. Byatt's pick is Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog. Oddsmakers like Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. The shortlist will be announced September 9 and the award ceremony is October 14.

Lambda Literary Memorial Video

Any video that starts with Barbara Gittings and has Allan Barnett at 2:40 is an automatic favorite. Here's the in memoriam short shown at the Lambda Literary Awards 20th anniversary celebration in Los Angeles in May and just posted to YouTube today. Watch it, and read them.

Born July 28: Sarah Schulman

Not to make life a competition, but why isn't Sarah Schulman more famous than Larry Kramer? She's written one play, two nonfiction books, and nine novels, including the award winning After Delores as well as Shimmer, Empathy, and Rat Bohemia, which is one of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels of all time. Her novel People in Trouble was the uncredited basis for the musical Rent. In the legal wrangling, Jonathan Larson's estate agreed that the playwright had lifted Schulman's "setting, themes, characters, plot, and ideas," yet since he did not use her exact words and phrasings, it isn't plagiarism. Schulman was a member of ACT-UP from 1987 to 1992, and  with Jim Hubbard she's making The ACT UP Oral History Project. They are also filming United in Anger, a documentary about ACT UP. In 1992 she founded The Lesbian Avengers with five other women. They started Dyke March, now a global standard the night before gay pride. Her next novel will be The Mere Future, to be published in 2009.

Born July 25: Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is a classic case of the cost the closet. Reviewing a recent biography of him by Pulitzer Prize winner William McFeely, Publishers Weekly wrote 

Eakins had a fortunate early life, with art studies in Paris and Spain, a sympathetic wife and a promising career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nevertheless, he suffered from a sense of failure, bouts of depression and conflicted feelings about his attraction to men. McFeely sees the painting Swimming [top], in particular, as indicative of Eakins's unfulfilled longings, but also of more than that: the image of the artist and five of his male students swimming in the nude embodies Eakins's Thoreauvian conviction that happiness can be found in freedom from society's constraints, in living at one with nature. Eakins never achieved this freedom, however. In 1886, he was asked to resign from the academy, probably because of his homosexuality and his insistence on using nude models in his life drawing classes, and his life became one of increasing despair.

Eakins was one of the first painters to take an interest in photography and especially liked shooting male nudes, so in their 19th century, sepia way, many of the clickable images from last year's post are NSFW. This includes the infamous full frontal picture of an aged Walt Whitman.

Gay Hadrian at the British Museum

In London, the British Museum's exhibit Hadrian: Empire and Conflict opens today. The show may be a first in that it accurately downplays the Roman emperor's empty marriage and shows the central and abiding love of his life to be Antinous. On October 2, Paul Roberts will give a lecture called "Sex and the Emperor," described online:

Hadrian’s loveless marriage and his passion for a young man were perhaps nothing unusual for an emperor, but his unprecedented grief after his lover Antinous died, and his exceptional commemoration of him, suggest a relationship far from the imperial ‘norm’.

The show is expected to be a blockbuster, especially popular with families, which makes the museum's focus on Hadrian's gay life all the more impressive to those of us living in a country of cowardly curators. In addition to the museum's interactive fare, the Guardian offers this tour of the exhibit, which runs through October 26.
 

Born July 24: Gus van Sant

In the early 80s, Gus van Sant worked in a New York advertising firm and saved $25,000 to make his first feature, the ground-breaking, darkly shot Mala Noche, about a young man’s crush on a Mexican hustler and the other Mexican hustler who sort of has a crush on him. (Best moment: When the second hustler is learning to drive on a deserted rode, he crashes the guy’s car directly without swerving or turning the wheel into a telephone pole. As they walk back to town the guy yells at him, “You drive like you f---!”) Van Sant followed that with Drugstore Cowboy, reviving Matt Dillon’s career with a role as an addict struggling to get clean, and My Own Private Idaho, more hustlers, this time white, reciting passages of Henry IV, but salvaged by being River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Next came the bizarre Even Cowgirls Get the Blues with Uma Thurman and k.d. lang, followed by the terrific To Die For, Nicole Kidman’s first great role as an ambitious small-town newscaster who enlists two wayward teens to help kill her husband. Wanting a mainstream hit and an Oscar, van Sant then made Good Will Hunting but at least he had the grace to parody himself counting his cash from that in the first Silent Bob movie. He used his new status in Hollywood to film a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, followed by a retread of Good Will Hunting called Finding Forrester, only this time the student was an athlete / writer and black. He’s made four smaller, more indie movies since then, usually infatuated with beautiful mopers and depressed youth: The improvised Gerry (Matt Damon & Casey Affleck lost in a desert), Elephant (thinly disguised Columbine), Last Days (thinly disguised Kurt Cobain), and the recent Paranoid Park (teen skateboarder accidentally kills security guard).

Although he has mainly ignored gay stories since his third film, van Sant did make the sweet Marais episode in Paris, je t’aime (shown in full here) and, as you've read many times, he's just finished filming one of this year's Oscar contenders, Milk. Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, with a supporting cast that includes James Franco as his lover and Josh Brolin as his killer, along with Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, and Stephen Spinella. Tom Ammiano  plays himself, which either means there's a present day sequence or the make-up department had to work hard, as the movie takes place thirty years ago. While I'm obviously thrilled by the idea of a high profile, big budget feature about gay history, I can't help but notice that the first major gay story since Brokeback Mountain again takes place in the past and ends with the more out man getting murdered. Name a Hollywood queer drama with a happy ending. It's either gay = tragedy (Wilde), or the narrative is degayed (Capote). Also, for a story set in the free and easy San Francisco of the 1970s, Milk's cast list is strangely devoid of women. All in all, of the two competing Harvey Milk projects, maybe the anointed one should have been Bryan Singer's The Mayor of Castro Street. Milk opens November 26 in limited release and widens December 5.

Van Sant has also shot fifteen music videos, among them: David Bowie's Fame '90, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge, Tracy Chapman's Bang Bang Bang, Chris Isaak's San Francisco Days, Elton John's The Last Song, STP's Creep, and Hanson's Weird.

Commercial Closet's 4th Annual Images in Advertising Awards

You still have time to get tickets to the Commercial Closet's 4th Annual Images in Advertising Awards ceremony Monday night in New York. Among the nominees in ten categories, listed here, are Orbitz, D&G, Wrigley, Chemistry.com,  and Levi's, whose spot is below. Nominees for best print ads include Macy's, Washington Mutual, and BMW. But why did the Commercial Closet discontinue their "Clean Up Your Act" anti-award, which this year would have seen stiff competition by homophobic ads from Snickers to Nike?

Born July 23: F. Holland Day

The pioneering photographer (1864-1933) with an eye for the Greek ideal.

Born July 22: Rufus Wainwright

Don't even try to resist Rufus Wainwright and his midtempo, art school melancholy. He came out when he was fourteen and after DreamWorks records automatically degayed his bio for his debut album when he was twenty-four, he insisted his official press kit say he is out. That self-titled cd made him the year’s critical darling, and Rolling Stone named him Best New Artist. His follow-up effort, Poses, was again a critical favorite, followed by Want One in 2003 and Want Two in 2004. His fifth studio album, Release the Stars, executive produced by Neil Tennant, was number two on the UK charts. In June 2006, he made history at Carnegie Hall by recreating, song by song, Judy Garland's famous 1961 concert there. Response was so ecstatic he was invited to repeat the show in London, Paris, and at the Hollywood Bowl, yet the sales of the subsequent live cd were lackluster, peaking at #171 in both the US and UK. Keeping his sense of humor, he titled the dvd of the concert Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! Does Judy! Judy! Judy! His several different performances of Hallelujah on YouTube have been viewed a total of more than five million times. Watch it below or, for more, take a look at his website.

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Dutch merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages (performed below by Charles Bryant). That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as all his poetry was, for its impenetrable confusion. As told in this comprehensive New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception to his now revered achievement was weak, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. The most devoted of later writers who revered him, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced painters as well, inspiring works by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope.

New Novels, New Orientations

 

Is there something about writing a thirteenth book that makes authors want to switch teams?

Before this week, openly gay writer E. Lynn Harris had published twelve books, all of which examined the lives of gay or bisexual black men and strong, smart, beautiful black women. According to AP, he's sold four million copies, so he's obviously struck a chord with readers. On Tuesday, Doubleday published his thirteenth book, Just Too Good To Be True, which is his first heterosexual novel. He says it took him four years to write. Here's the plot: A college quarterback falls in love with a cheerleader. Except it's really about a son's obsessive, co-dependent relationship with his mother, so maybe it's not such a departure after all.

Louise Erdrich's thirteenth novel, The Plague of Doves, is dazzlingly original. In 1911 in Pluto, North Dakota, four Ojibwe men are lynched for a murder they didn't commit; one of them survives the hanging; the lives of their descendants and the descendants of the white vigilantes intertwine throughout the twentieth century. Told like As I Lay Dying from many multiple points of view, the novel covers nearly the whole town over several decades, with some episodes seemingly less relevant (or more far fetched) than others, yet every story adds to the themes of history, love, betrayal, and redemption. Late in the book, the primary narrator, the surviving lynched man's granddaughter Evelina Harp, who has long nursed a crush on the blond grandson of one of the lynch mob, discovers she's a lesbian. She's nineteen. Her coming out romance takes place in a mental institution, which literary readers will either find objectionable or deftly subversive. Philip Roth calls The Plague of Doves a "masterpiece" and even Michiko raved.

Born July 17: Berenice Abbott

Ahead of her time all her life, Berenice Abbott was raised by her single, divorced mother and dropped out of Ohio State to move to Greenwich Village. That was 1918, and the following year she nearly died from the influenza pandemic. Two years later she moved to Europe to study sculpture, and two years after that she fell in love with photography when Man Ray hired her as his assistant specifically because she didn't know anything about it and therefore would do exactly as told. (He captured her, at left.) By 1926 she had her own studio on the rue du Bac before moving to rue Servandoni the next year. While quickly achieving renown for her own work, Abbott tirelessly promoted other photographers, particularly Eugene Atget, whose images she championed for forty years until 1968, when she convinced the curators at MoMA to buy the archive of his photos. Although she was extremely sought after in Paris, taking portraits of everyone from Jean Cocteau and James Joyce to Coco Chanel and Janet Flanner, a quick trip back to New York caused her to abandon France and return to Manhattan in order to photograph the city. For six years she worked without any support, rejected by organizations and individuals who failed to see any value in her vision. In 1935, however, the Federal Art Project hired her to continue her series, now called Changing New York. These are her most enduring images. During this time she fell in love and began living with Elizabeth McCausland, a critic, and they remained together more than thirty years until McCausland's death in 1965. Abbott lived on until 1991, not only widening her subjects to include antebellum architecture, U.S. 1, and Maine, but also inventing photography gadgets like the distortion easel and the forerunner to the autopole. The video below contrasts Abbott's iconic views of New York in the 30s with the same locations as they looked in the 1990s.

Kay Ryan, Out Lesbian, To Be Named U.S. Poet Laureate

How awesome is that? Tomorrow James Billington, the librarian of Congress, will announce Kay Ryan, 62, as the nation's 16th poet laureate. She lives modestly in Marin County with her longtime partner Carol Adair, whom she married in San Francisco in 2004. You may recognize her name from The New Yorker, where her poems frequently appear. She describes her work as, “An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying.” Of her early beginnings as a poet, she tells this story:

Ryan decided to pursue writing seriously after having an epiphany while bicycling up the Rocky Mountains while on a 4,000-mile, cross-country bicycle trip in 1976. When she returned home, she set to work. She began using a deck of Tarot cards as an exercise, forcing herself to write a poem about the subject of whichever card she drew at random. Some of the subjects were harder than others.

She follows in the literary footsteps of Elizabeth Bishop (brilliant, less out) who held the position from 1949-50 when it was called Library of Congress Consultant Poet. A great interview with Kay Ryan can be found here.

Love Is a Cannibal at Sloan Fine Art

Raising the internet hookup to an art form, Jesse Finley Reed photographs men he meets from online communities in Berlin and New York. His striking, backlit, jumbo portraits (40" x 50") are part of a three man show curated by Becky Smith (Bellwether) opening tonight at Sloan Fine Art on Rivington. Jesse graduated from Tufts in 1998 and earned his MFA in photography from Yale in 2004. He has had solo or group shows in Athens, Berlin, New Zealand, Los Angeles, and New York. His artist statement discusses the "disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject:"

nightclubs are brightly light, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models.

There is an implication of queerness that plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation.

The other two artists are Tyler Coburn and David Benjamin Sherry. Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview and his photography has been included in group shows in London, Berlin, and New York. Sherry earned his MFA last year and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Vienna. Love Is a Cannibal "looks at the variety of ways these artists depict gay-male longing by using staged, constructed and manipulated photography." Tonight's reception is from 7:00 to 9:00; the show runs through September 13.

Born July 16: Reinaldo Arenas

In his searing memoir Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and  got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase. Seven years later he got aids. Ravaged by the unstoppable disease and depressed by the lack of attention paid to his work, he intentionally overdosed on his medicine on December 7, 1990. His memoir was published in Spanish in 1992 and in English the following year. In 2000, Before Night Falls was adapted by Julian Schnabel into the award winning film starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp [below, as Bon Bon], Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn, further securing Arenas's lasting importance.

Samuel R. Delany: The Polymath

Samuel R. Delany has defied expectation from the beginning, sixty-six years ago. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest preppy at Horace Mann and Dalton (alongside Wallace Shawn), and when he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. His twenty-ninth work of fiction will be published this fall and many of his fourteen nonfiction books are still in print. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Although he was married to a woman for nineteen years and fathered a daughter, he was openly gay for much of that time. Because he has been an aficionado of XXX theaters and video booths for decades, he estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be fifty thousand. A documentary covering all aspects of his life, The Polymath, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and has screened at many lgbt festivals since. Friday night, it's Philadelphia's turn, and Delany will attend the Q&A, in case you have any questions not covered by this week's City Paper interview. The movie shows Jonathan Lethem to be a fan; shouldn't he get Remnick to let him do a major New Yorker profile of the world's leading black, gay, sci-fi intellectual?

I can't find a trailer for The Polymath online. If you can, please let me know.

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents turns eighty today, and really the man has a lot to celebrate. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-love Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and this year's triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His candid autobiography is called Original Story By. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

The blond movie star and the brilliant movie watcher.