Band of Thebes

The Museum of Innocence Wins Museum of the Year

Just when you thought Orhan Pamuk had nothing left to win, his Museum of Innocence has been named the European Museum of the Year. If you can't get to Istanbul this year, read his catalog, The Innocence of Objects, and of course his walloping novel. In a thousand years there will never be a better story about this museum than Sandy Leonard's.

The jury said, "The Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century. It is also, however, a museum created by writer Orhan Pamuk as an integral, object-based version of the fictional love story of his novel of the same name. The Museum of Innocence is meant as a small and personal, local and sustainable model for new museum development. The Museum of Innocence inspires and establishes innovative, new paradigms for the museum sector. This museum fulfils to the highest degree the notion of 'public quality,' from the point of view both of heritage and of the public."

The EMYA is 37 years old. Last year's winner was the Riverside Museum in Glasgow. 

Trans Man Wins Authors' Club Best First Novel of the Year

"...Thrillingly erudite and infectiously entertaining, completely compelling and morally unsettling. The voice never falters, and the execution is masterful. What a marvellous book – a tour de force," said judge Isabel Wolff of Jack Wolf's debut The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones [and Kindle], which just won the Authors' Club Best First Novel award in London. Previously, Wolf's novel was a finalist for the Polari First Book Prize. According to TLC,

"Jack Wolf, who wrote the novel as a woman and has since transitioned to being a man, has fully embraced both the language and ideas of eighteenth-century England to create a beautiful and startling novel that contemplates questions of good and evil, faith and science, that are still relevant today. Moreover, while it does not explicitly deal with issues of gender identity, Wolf’s experience of transitioning from female to male is reflected in the writing, in particular in its focus on identity and what it feels like to be uncomfortable in one’s own skin.

"The year is 1751 and Tristan Hart, a precociously talented student of medicine is studying under the legendary Dr. William Hunter in London. Tristan is fascinated by the nature of pain and preventing it; the relationship between mind and matter and the existence of God. He is a product of the Enlightenment, a rational man on a quest to cut through darkness and superstition with the scientific method.

"But that is just one side of Tristan. Tristan is also a psychopath and a deviant, obsessed with

Born June 6: Thomas Mann

In 1975, twenty years after his death, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s newly unsealed diaries showed the full extent of his homosexual desires. Although he married when he was thirty and fathered six children, Mann considered his love for Paul Ehrenberg, a painter and violinist twenty-one years his junior, to be the “central experience of my heart.” Similarly, a real-life infatuation with a Polish boy inspired him to write the classic novel of gay yearning, Death in Venice. To varying degrees gay themes are also evident in The Magic Mountain, Tonio Kroger, Mario and the Magician, Doctor Faustus, The Deceived, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. In nearly all cases, the gay character dies, because Mann believed open homosexuality would kill society and destroy the individual, even though he felt homoeroticism was artistically necessary and inspired much of his own work. For the full convoluted rationale, see his 1925 essay “About Marriage.” No surprise, then, that Mann's relationship with his three queer children,  Klaus, Golo, and Erika, was complicated. Colm Toibin writes about it in an LRB essay called I Could Sleep with All of Them reviewing Andrea Weiss's enthralling bio, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story. Among my all-time top ten favorite books of any kind is his novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family [and Kindle].

John Banville Wins Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature

A peerless prose stylist, John Banville has won most of the major Irish and British book awards and many of the best international prizes, including the Lannan Literary Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and now the Prince of Asturias Prize. Of his sixteen novels, The Untouchable [and Kindle] is the only one with a gay protagonist, loosely based on Anthony Blunt. In his spare time Banville writes plays, stories, criticism, screenplays (including the queer Albert Nobbs), and, so far, eight mysteries under the name Benjamin Black. The most recent of those, The Black-Eyed Blonde, deftly channels Raymond Chandler and brings back Philip Marlowe. Listen to this:

"It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere.”

 

Born June 5: Compton-Burnett, Orman, Keynes

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools: lesbians have More Women Than Men (1933) and gay men  get Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream, a NYT #1 bestseller. She does not invest in

Eimear McBride Wins the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

In an upset over Donna Tartt's Pulitzer winner The Goldfinch and Chimamanda Adichie's NBCC winner Americanah, Eimear McBride's debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing has just won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). Her victory breaks the five-year winning streak by American authors: Robinson, Kingsolver, Obreht, Miller, Homes. Written in six months and unpublished for nine years, the book has also won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year award. Published by a small startup in Norwich, England, it will be released by Coffee House Press in the US in September. (Imported copies are available now via the link.)

Carsick: John Waters Thumbs His Way Into America

After the shockingly good Role Models, who could resist his next book, out today, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America [and Kindle]? His hometown paper The Baltimore Sun explains

"Two springs ago, Baltimore's most unrepentant degenerate set out on a mission of discovery. Beginning on Charles Street, not far from his home, Waters would hitchhike all the way to his San Francisco condo, following Interstate 70 most of way. There would be little in the way of advance planning; he'd be relying totally on his thumb and the kindness of strangers.

"The reading public is about to be let in on all that happened, and more. Waters' seventh book, Carsick, to be released June 3 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, comes in thirds. In the first third, Waters imagines the best rides he could possibly have gotten, including one from a drug dealer who agrees to finance his next movie, no questions asked, and another that gives his body welcome (if perhaps somewhat disreputable) superpowers. The second third details the worst things that could have happened, a handful of nightmare scenarios, many of which cannot be described in a family newspaper, that lead to a gruesome end for our hero.

"And then there's what really happened, a cross-country voyage with a cast of characters that includes an animal rescuer, police officers, a small-town mayor, a New York-based indie rock band and a 21-year-old GOP town councilman from Western Maryland — dubbed The Corvette Kid — who picks him up twice, and ends up playing the savior in Waters' little tale."

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [and Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. See fifty-nine of his images here and one below.

Lambda Literary Award Winners 2014

     

Congratulations to 26 winning books in 24 categories at Lambda's event in New York.

GAY GENERAL FICTION: Mundo Cruel, Luis Negron

LESBIAN GENERAL FICTION: Happiness, Like Water, Chinelo Okparanta 

BISEXUAL FICTION: My Education, Susan Choi

LGBT DEBUT FICTION: Descendants Of Hagar, Nik Nicholson

LGBT GRAPHIC NOVEL: Calling Dr. Laura, Nicole J. Georges

GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY: A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956-1984, Glenway Wescott, Jerry Rosco

LESBIAN MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY: Body Geographic Barrie Jean Borich

John D'Emilio's In a New Century

The terrific historian and co-honcho at Out History.org, John D'Emilio's In a New Century [and Kindle] collects his recent essays on queer history, gay politics, and community life. University of Wisconsin Press says:

"For gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the United States, the twenty-first century has brought dramatic changes: the end of sodomy laws, the elimination of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a move toward recognition of same-sex marriage, Gay-Straight Alliances in thousands of high schools, and an explosion of visibility in the media and popular culture. All of this would have been unimaginable to those living just a few decades ago. Yet, at the same time, the American political system has grown ever more conservative, and increasing economic inequality has been a defining feature of the new century.
            "A pioneering scholar of gay history, John D’Emilio reflects in this wide-ranging collection of essays upon the social, cultural, and political changes provoked by LGBT activism. He offers provocative questions and historical analyses: What can we learn from a life-long activist like Bayard Rustin, who questioned the wisdom of “identity politics”? Was Richard Nixon a “gay liberationist”? How can knowing local stories—like those of Chicago in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—help build stronger communities and enrich traditions of activism? Might the focus on achieving actually be evidence of growing conservatism in LGBT communities?
            "In a New Century provides a dynamic, thoughtful, and important resource for identifying changes that have occurred in the United States since 1960, taking stock of the work that still needs to be done, and issuing an urgent call to action for getting there."

Recapturing Radical Queer: Mausoleum of Lovers

Triple threat Stephen Motika, author of Western Practice, program director of Poets House, and publisher of Nightboat Books, invited me to Thursday's exhilarating, overflow double launch (above) at Callicoon Fine Arts of dead novelist Hervé Guibert's photo exhibition (below) and reading from his just published, really amazing, arty and sexy Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Douglas Martin was there! Wayne Koestenbaum gives the book a super rave review -- "magnitude itself" -- in the upcoming Bookforum. I pecked through the episodic passages here and there and was transported. Guibert died of aids at 36, leaving behind, among other work, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Ghost Image.

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

You could make a case that the Big Bang moment of the modern lgbt universe was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 when he was 36. His open celebration of love between men was a major inspiration to Oscar Wilde and to Edward Carpenter and to scores of other towering queer leaders who have turned the tide of human history. Born in Long Island the second of nine children, he moved frequently with his poor and unlucky family and dropped out of school at 11. He jumped from job to job, teaching, journalism, government clerk. He was fired from his post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the new Secretary of the Interior read his book. Whitman became a nurse during the Civil War and in 1866 met his beloved Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor. He lived until 1892. For the full story, read Gary Schmidgall's MLA Prize winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Ignore the generations of scholars who have tried to degay him, the contemporary critics who claim his homosexuality is "irrelevant," and his own late life prevarications about his having had a wife and children. Also, read the poems.

 

Reading the West Awards & Irish Novel of the Year

 

Earlier today the Mountains & Plains Booksellers announced their annual awards for the best writing of the West.

Fiction: The Son by Philipp Meyer (also a Pulitzer finalist)

Nonfiction: The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko

Children's: The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole by Eric Pierpoint

Earlier this week came the announcement of the Irish Novel of the Year, which turned out to be yet another honor for Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the unstoppable debut that was written in six months then languished unpublished for nine years. Previously, it won the Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and is currently a finalist for the Orange Baileys Women's Prize.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

This is his year: last month Colm Tóibín was named chairman of the PEN World Voices festival (replacing Salman Rushdie) and on October 7 comes his new novel Nora Webster, about an Irish woman widowed at 40 with four children, a certain contender for major awards. Twenty-four years ago, after being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His story collection, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent and won the Lammy for gay fiction. His earlier story collection was Mothers and Sons and his newer essay collection is New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Out in the Army: My Life as Gay Soldier

"A wonderful, stirring and thrilling read. I laughed, wept and winced… " said Stephen Fry of James Wharton's memoir Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier [and Kindle]. Released in the UK last summer, nominated for a Stonewall Award last fall, the book was published here two weeks ago. 

Biteback books says,

"Seeking escape from the quiet Welsh countryside, James Wharton joined the British Army. Along the way, he faced a battle of his own: finding the courage to tell his fellow soldiers he is gay.

"Written with searing honesty, James charts his incredible journey from punch bag to poster boy, along the way describing the tribulations of coming to terms with his sexuality. Late nights in the clubs of Soho to early mornings guarding the Queen; rocket attacks in Iraq to tank rides with Prince Harry on the plains of Canada—this is James's life out in the army."

Born May 29: Rupert Everett

Bitter about his stalled film career (thirty years since Another Country opposite a baby Colin Firth), sourly against gay marriage ("beyond tragic"), Rupert Everett at 55 has finally settled into the dual careers he was always meant to have, stage actor and author. Last year he was nominated for an Olivier Award for playing Oscar Wilde in a West End revival of The Judas Kiss, and he is writing a biopic covering Wilde's final years. Also last year he co-starred with Benedict Cumberbatch, Janet McTeer, and Rebecca Hall in a five-part minseries of Parade's End. He has published two novels, which I expected to be charming and frivilous and found to be charming and affecting: Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St.Tropez. His two memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years, are spiced with sharper flavors. He shifts between politely savaging the egomania of his more famous co-stars and dutifully recording the wisdom of his family: 'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?'

Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful." 

Born May 28: Patrick White

When you count gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you get beyond André Gide and Thomas Mann? The Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, won the award in 1973. Although White never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, he inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. He lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, Lascaris survived him thirteen years. 

Fleet Week Image of the Day #8

   

Two favorite captains from New Bedford's Whaling Museum. Though none can touch Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.

Stephen Greco's Now and Yesterday

You know Stephen Greco as a journalist and an administrator of the Ferro-Grumley, and today he releases his sweeping literary novel about longtime gay friends in Brooklyn, Now and Yesterday [and Kindle]. Ed White says it's "an often poignant, and sometimes chilling, romance of the creative class," and Kirkus writes

"Greco slides a slice of American gay culture under the literary microscope. Peter and Harold settled in Brooklyn in the 1970s, committed lovers, one with journalism ambitions, the other a poet. Then Harold died during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Peter forgot poetry and built a boutique ad agency, now gobbled up by a conglomerate, where he peddled "goods and services for a brave new world in which more people needed more things." With but one serious relationship post-Harold, Peter lives at the edge of loneliness. Greco believably sketches New York's gay culture—the right parties, the right place for clothing, and who's shtupping whom—while watching Peter redefine himself. Peter laments and dithers and becomes almost a less-interesting character than his friend Jonathan, a celebrated documentary filmmaker dying of prostate cancer. Greco delves artfully into Peter's stumbling friendship-turned-romance with Will, a young California writer seeking prestige bylines, and lays it against his refusal to take up with rent boys. A second narrative thread places Peter at a moral crossroads when his corporate bosses demand he cook up a campaign for a Glenn Beck-like demagogue. With his gift for observation and turns of phrase—"the remains of an intellectual enshrined in the urn of a glamorous career"—Greco offers a book about big ideas rather than action: ideas about gay life; about the depths and importance of friendship; about money and power; about the need for love and sex; and about a man's moral relationship to who he is and what he does. Greco has written a life-affirming yet melancholy, John O'Hara-like analysis of post-baby-boom-meets-millennial-queer Big Apple society."

Greco's previous books include The Sperm Engine and Dreadnought.