Band of Thebes

Idiocy Is the Goal

I think people who doubt this as a possibility didn't learn the lessons of Enron, Lehman, et al: sometimes men at the top really are willing to send the whole train off the bridge for their personal power and gain. Charles Simic nails the stupid epidemic:

"Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

"An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country... A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

"It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time."

Keep reading his essay here.

National Book Award Winners: Erdrich, Boo, Alexander, Ferry

   

Who's the Nate Silver of literary awards? Announced tonight in New York: 

FICTION

Junot Dí­az, This Is How You Lose Her

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

winner - Louise Erdrich, The Round House [Kindle]

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

 
 
NONFICTION
 
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

winner - Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers [Kindle]

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson 

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East

 

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

winner -- William Alexander, Goblin Secrets [Kindle]

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered

Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

POETRY

winner - David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations [Kindle]

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic

Susan Wheeler, Meme

Best of Summer: The Call by Yannick Murphy

Don't tell me everything is dandy in book publishing. Throwaway thrillers get the full hardcover treatment in prime months and enduring literary fiction is released as tissue-grade paperbacks in the off season. Two marvelous, midlist, mid-career straight novelists who ought to be poised for major breakouts, Martha Southgate and Yannick Murphy, both coming off wonderful recent hardcovers, are seeing their new work relegated to paperback originals. This robs them of the proper build-up of stellar reviews and great word of mouth in hardcover that can burst into a huge success when the book is reinvented as a paperback a year later. The gold standard in this model is Bel Canto, a fourth novel that underperformed in hardcover then made Ann Patchett's career in paperback when most of the reading world wondered, How did I miss this? Without that two-tiered strategy, the time for Southgate's The Taste of Salt [[Kindle]] and Murphy's The Call [[Kindle]] is now or never. Choose now.

Yannick Murphy's The Call [[Kindle]] is the best novel of the summer. The story of a rural New England veterinarian, his wife, three kids, and a county of animals is touching, tense, funny, and true. Spiritually, the book belongs on the same shelf as Wendell Berry, Kent Haruf, Barbara Kingsolver, and Wallace Stegner. Indicative of Murphy's immense talent and gripping storytelling is that very soon into the novel you will no longer notice it is told entirely in the form of call reports from David's vet visits. It isn't a gimmick, it's the perfect distillation of the way he thinks. And of how he tackles problems, the worst of which are severely dwindling business, mounting bills, and two domestic crises. The first is a hunting accident that leaves the family and the reader in suspended anxiety. Yet that awfulness also, inevitably, heightens his perceptions of everyday life. David is a keen observer of creature habits, nature, mechanics, personality quirks, language (English, German, cussing), food, familial bonds, swimming, and substitute teaching. Unlike the overwritten State of Wonder which sledgehammers home its allusions by having Marina point out how similar she is to the mythic heroine she is watching on stage, The Call thrives on subtlety. A looming decision of vital importance is given a pair of doppelgangers -- scar and cheetah -- gracefully woven into one natural paragraph.

What Video We Rented From the Library: How we love the library and leave it with armloads of books and movies, even if the service at the library is slow, and the librarian who has been there for years always looks at the scanner gun for a few moments first before he uses it on our books' labels as if he's never seen the scanner gun before. And I know this librarian and he is also on the masters swim team and I have seen him in his swim trunks, and there is a huge scar on his belly that even pulling up the waistband of his trunks way up past his navel does not hide and I wondered what part of him was surgically removed or rearranged. He is a very slow swimmer, and it seems as if he goes backward instead of forward in the water, or that he goes nowhere at all. It was the librarian who recommended the video to Mia. The video was about mammals and Mia watched it first and then wanted me to watch it with her. The cheetah, I learned, will let one of her offspring share her kill with her even years later, even when the offspring is an adult she will remember it, but she will never let any other adult share with her. Isn't that amazing? Mia said.

What I Said: Yes, it really is amazing, and I hugged Mia on my lap while I said it and I smelled her hair that smelled faintly like our house when we walk into it after we've been away for a few days.

Although in its final pages the story stumbles with a too-tidy resolution, nothing should deter you from this beautiful and powerful ode to gentle, modest lives lived with integrity.

Alice Munro Is 80, Publishes First Lesbian Story

On Sunday, Alice Munro turned eighty. On a civilized planet the day would have been celebrated with bouquets of wildflowers, very expensive champagne, and a quiet half-hour to re-read your favorite story of hers. Probably something from Friend of My Youth or Open Secrets but it might date back from The Moons of Jupiter or The Progress of Love. (For once, novices really can get many of the author's very best works in the Selected Stories.) Proving that she still has new things to say in her eighth decade, Munro last month published Gravel in The New Yorker, marking what may be the first time she has written about a lesbian. I can't think of another; please correct me gently in the comments. Although she almost always uses a female protagonist, she has twice written about gay men, memorably in 1980's Turkey Season (from The Moons of Jupiter) and 1993's The Jack Randa Hotel (in Open Secrets). Her thirteenth collection of stories is coming in October 2012.

World's Fastest Solo Eiger Summit + Queer Climbing Clubs

Not off topic if it inspires you to get The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Or join one of these fourteen queer climbing clubs:

Georgia Dyno 'Mos -- Atlanta (100+ members since April 2010)

Glam Climb of Texas -- Austin

Lez Climb -- Bay Area lesbians

Flame and Flash -- Bay Area queers

Queerabiners -- Boston

Not So Trad -- London 

Heel Hookers -- Los Angeles

Crux -- New York

R.O.C. -- Orlando

Rock Out -- Richmond

St. Louis 'Mo Climbers -- St. Louis

Crag Crux Climbers -- Toronto

T.O. 'Mo Climbers -- Toronto

LGBT Rock Climbing Group -- Vancouver

Homo Climbtastic hosts the world's largest queer climbing gatherings, which gives it bragging rights to claim "HC is the goddamn center of the queer climbing universe." Last weekend they wrangled more than 70 lgbt folk from all over out to California to climb in Bishop.

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

Bird Cloud the ranch is 640 acres in south central Wyoming on which Annie Proulx built her dream house, vexed by poor planning, worse advice, unavoidable tedium, harsh conditions, unrealistic expectations, bad luck, and awful organization -- saved by the beauty of the landscape and the artistry of the craftsmen from being a total disaster, but crushingly far from the gem it was intended to be. Bird Cloud [[Kindle]] the book is too often the same.

Fatal to the house is the realtor's telling her the county road is plowed in winter; after sinking 'all' her money in building the year-round home, she discovers the road isn't plowed, meaning with the heavy snowfall drifting in huge winds, she can only live there from April to October. Fatal to the book, which she intends as a dual ode to place and the unsung heroic contractors dubbed the James Gang, is her decision not to give the Wyomingites a line of dialogue. Jesus, Zeus, and Shakespeare worked overtime perfecting Proulx's ear for the way people talk in her fiction, so how she thought she could convey character in a memoir without letting us hear her characters speak is a confounding mystery.

Likewise, her hardened sense of privacy is a rough fit with personal nonfiction. She wants to share her generous wonder, and her many frustrations, but not the basics. Typically, her children and their spouses appear at random moments, but devoid of physical description, speech, or personality, they remain flat, mute names on the page. Vulgar, prying readers expecting any details about "a friend" who spends time with her in the house will be foiled. Proulx's reticence extends to the project at hand. She frets about dire cost overruns but won't reveal prices. She includes her own quick line drawings as chapter openers -- a bolt of cloth, pine needles, arrowheads, a falcon -- but no image of the house.

As the building debacle suffered from the lack of a project manager to corral the architect in Aspen, the local contractors, the state inspectors, the roofers in New Mexico, the wood suppliers in Alaska, the tilemakers in Brazil, the incompetent floor man, and the peppery client, the book suffers from the lack of what used to be an editor. The narrative loses considerable oomph through its hindsight telling (as opposed to showing) and the structure is a mess. The opening three pages comparing Bird Cloud to Australia's Uluru slide into a catalog of childhood dwellings, followed by a stand-alone chapter on the Proulxs' French-Canadian ancestry. The third chapter recounts adult dwellings, the history of lodgepole pines, and on page 45 begins the hunt for a place to build what will be Bird Cloud. That saga ends on page 137, but, lumpily, the book has three more chapters. Readers turn the page in anticipation of the pleasures of living in the finished house, and are dropped into an account of the railroad barons and white ranchers who have dominated the land, with a gripping account of their prolonged eagle slaughter (and boastful defiance of the federal government) up until the 1970s. The next chapter goes back to much earlier times, describing the Utes' millenia on the land, their fates, and Proulx's friends' attempts to excavate ancient fire rings on the property. The final chapter is a deep appreciation of the ranch's bird life during one year. Impossible as it sounds, John McPhee or Ian Frazier would have worked these globby parts into a single coherent flow.

To repeat, the project is saved by the beauty of the landscape and the craftsmanship. Despite the running hum of complaint, Proulx's prose remains a pleasure and her eye unerring. An unrelated sidetrip to an elk-collaring project in subzero temperatures before dawn is a thrill, as is her deft take on its leader: "Although Ron had a house and family, his truck was his real home." She spares nothing, even listing her own faults -- "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see..." -- and views the natural world with the same tough realism. Yet her love of the region, and her place in particular, is palpable. Installing six miles of fence, she carefully nurtures the overgrazed land back to life, attracting everything from porcupines and antelope and mountain lions to a stray blue heron.

Perhaps the book was even more personal than readers could guess, writing as the means by which a writer lets go. Western United Reality has Bird Cloud Ranch listed for $3.7 million.

In Tearing Haste: Letters of Deborah Mitford and Patrick Leigh Fermor

You could have no nobler new year's resolution than to be more like Patrick Leigh Fermor. If you're in school, drop out immediately and walk from the English Channel to Istanbul, as he did from December 1933 to January 1935, starting when he was 18. (After that he spent more than two years in Crete, as a UK special ops officer, disguised as a shepherd, living in caves, leading the Greek resistance. In the badly titled and inaccurate movie of those events, Ill Met By Moonlight, he's played by Dirk Bogarde.) If you're going to be 96 next month, continue work on volume three of your memoir of that first, fabled walk. (The two extent volumes, from 1977 and 1986, are the immortal classics A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.)

Now with In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor readers can see behind the many travel books to more than fifty years of personal life, from 1954 to 2007. His long volleys and her short returns are crowded with half a century of famous figures from Asquith, Diana Cooper, the Kennedys, Betjemen, Evelyn Waugh and Truman Capote to Lucian Freud, Bruce Chatwin, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Everywhere, their correspondence is enlivened by her quotations of the vast Derbyshire staff at her 126-room country house Chatsworth and his interactions with his beloved local Greeks. Chatwin's visit to PLF in Greece inspires only "v nice, tremendous know-all, reminds me of a couplet by O Goldsmith .... He's a great pal of Jackie Onassis." In letters festooned with marvellous, glorious, genius, and frequent comparisons to Heaven, Paradise, and Mecca, you see where "v nice" falls. And don't ever doubt Debo, who is after all the last Mitford sister, or her ability to rise to the level of his letters. Her reply:

"Bruce Chatwin. OH how unfair you knowing him. He wrote a book which I so adored I've never really felt like another. You know what I mean, like my Dad & White Fang.

"How ghoul if he's a know-all, but I wd like just to see & smell him to see for myself. Or is it like meeting royal people & actors, better not?"

Admirers of PLF's rough and tumble travels may need a moment to adjust to the extremely high altitude of his letters, all of which begin, "Darling Debo," and at times threaten to float higher still, into a stratosphere reserved for Wodehouse characters. Things are "frightfully good" or "jolly" and rather than be as common as to say "unfortunately..." PLF announces "the pestilential thing is..." If it ever feels twee, it's balanced by his many truly charming quick line drawings throughout and two 8-page photo inserts.

The crowning highlight is a twenty-page account of his 1972 trek in the Pindus Mountains with three other men and a married couple, a totally improvised trip after being refused permission to climb the Hakkiari in Turkish Kurdistan. Rock slides, snow fields, local guides, 4:00am wakings, the cold, the wet, a steady wonder of flora, fauna, vistas -- all the joys of an ascent conveyed in clear, grounded prose. As with the entire collection, you'll feel privileged for the first-hand look at a fading world of intelligent dash.

Readers who have devoured all the other PLF titles will be gratified to discover NYRB Classics is next week re-issuing his first book, The Traveller's Tree, describing his solo tour through Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti in the pre-tourist days of the late 1940s.

Signs of South Dakota

 

 

 

January 20: The Inauguration

(The shoe throwing in Dupont Circle was January 19.)

You'll find this hard to believe but thousands of people around us left immediately after the inaugural address, before the poem. To my mind, both the speech and the poem were sincere efforts and missed opportunities, without any phrase or imagery that will endure. I did, however, appreciate the Bush/Cheney criticism.

Ultimately I think Obama is a better speechmaker than speechwriter. He creates a lofty, vague mood but nothing specific stays with the listener. If I'm wrong, recite your favorite lines from the Denver speech. Or summarize its thesis.

Understandably, everyone is focused on the new, and thank god for that, but I did think the Official Bush Farewell Poem, released late yesterday morning, was more to the point.

There was a man from Texas
Who was hated by both sexes.
Everything he tried
Depended on a lie,
And he left with no successes.

January 19: OMG! The Crowds! You'll Never Be Able To Get To DC!

Bollywood Award for Best Couple Goes to Gay Pretenders

Wednesday night in Mumbai the 15th Star Screen Awards marked a first for Southeast Asian cinema as the Best Couple award was won by two male actors whose characters pretend to be gay. That's news, given that homosexuality is still illegal in India. And it signals a shift in the homophobic society that two major Bollywood stars agreed to play the roles. Since the movie's release in November, superstar John Abraham's yellow swim trunks have become nearly as popular as that blue pair, and apparently he even appeared in them during the black tie ceremony on Wednesday. (Since 2002, he's been dating a female co-star from his first movie, Jism.) The other actor, Abhishek Bachchan, is married to international icon Aishwarya Rai who was nominated in the same category. Dostana aims to be a frothy, over the top comedy that good naturedly pokes fun at all stereotypes including gay cliches. While I'm not a fan of the "OMG! They're Gays!!! But Not Really!" storyline, I did laugh once during this trailer, which is a giant leap from my reaction to previews for Boat Trip or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

John Irving: Most Reread, Anticipated Contemporary Is Edmund White

While I was lost in The New Yorker, Andy Towle was tracking down the Nashville Scene (via the National Post) for an interview with John Irving from November. Irving reveals his next novel, coming in October, is called Last Night in Twisted River and it's his third political novel, though "not as overtly political" as Cider House or Owen Meany. He also shares his adult dislike of Catcher in the Rye and his love of Edmund White. He said:

And I am reading Edmund White's Hotel de Dream—what White calls "a New York novel." It's also historical: about Stephen Crane, who is dying, dictating a novel to his wife—about a boy prostitute in New York in the 1890s. It's a novel-within-a-novel, and it's flawless. I love Edmund White. Every time I read a new book of his, I am reminded of a previous book of his, which I then reread. I've interrupted Hotel de Dream to reread White's novel A Boy's Own Story, which I love, and White's autobiography My Lives. He's a wonderful writer. We're the same age, and I remember when I first read A Boy's Own Story—in the early 1980s—and I thought that the novel spoke much more to me about a boy coming of age (even though it's about a gay boy coming of age, and I'm not gay) than The Catcher in the Rye ever did. I reread The Catcher in the Rye recently, and it doesn't hold up at all; it's just not very well, or very consistently, written. But A Boy's Own Story is beautifully wrought, and fiercely defiant; I could reread that novel every year and find something terrific I had missed in a previous reading.

I believe Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he's certainly the contemporary American writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading most.

 

National Film Registry Adds In Cold Blood, Johnny Guitar, Deliverance

On Tuesday, Librarian of Congress James Billington announced his selections of the twenty-five movies added to the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant. Among the honorees of gay interest are In Cold Blood (1967) and bisexual Nicholas Ray's so-called "lesbian western" Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. Also added was Deliverance, whose male rape scene epitomized for decades America's horror of sex between men. Among the other films were Sergeant York, A Face in the Crowd, The Asphalt Jungle, The Invisible Man, and The Terminator, as well as the predominantly Asian Flower Drum Song (1961) and the all black Hallelujah (1929). These selections bring the total number of movies in the twenty-year-old registry to five hundred. As their website explains, "These films are not selected as the 'best' American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring significance to American culture."

Happy New Year's Eve

Hoping your New Year's Eve rocks, safely, from Alaska (though the polar bears are on Fifth Avenue).

Season's Greetings from North Pole, Alaska

Taken during our visit in September. (Like so much in Alaska, the town name is a complete misnomer. Obviously.) Today in North Pole, AK the sun will rise at 10:55 am and set at 2:45 pm. That's just over twenty hours of night. The high temperature will hover around 7 degrees, which is above their average. Warm and bright holiday wishes to all readers.

Golden Globes Really Don't Like Milk

You live in a world where Tropic Thunder earned twice as many Golden Globe nominations as Milk. Also, where the movie about the priest maybe molesting the boy received four times as many nods as the biopic of the courageous gay rights leader. Just saying. In total, Milk earned one nomination, for Sean Penn. He will be competing against Brad Pitt, above.

Most nominated were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry, the silver fox who made Billy Elliot and The Hours. He used to be gay and says he is "still gay" despite marrying his wife and having a baby with her. 

Strong Women Weekend: Renée Fleming as Thaïs

Strong Women Weekend ended on a high note last night as the Met premiered a new production of Thaïs. With its typical story arc of monk meets harlot, harlot scoffs then converts, monk reconsiders and wants to get carnal, harlot says no and dies, the opera has long been considered (merely) a star vehicle for its soprano. Renée Fleming soared, as did the other star of the evening, her costumes (and hers only) specially designed by Christian Lacroix. Which is not to overlook the awesome Thomas Hampson who earned a thundering ovation.

Speaking of strong women, during the first intermission I passed Sigourney Weaver and silently urged her to revive Sgt. Ripley. During the second intermission I left to get a Vitamin Water at the same time Anna Wintour and companion were heading for Bar Boulud. If I were more self-promoting [New Year's resolution?], I would mention she eyed me three times, apparently not in horror. When I returned, I saw Christine Baranski. At the end, walking home, I passed a car that suggested Caroline Kennedy was there.

I know: Every weekend is Strong Women Weekend.

Strong Women Weekend: Marlene Dumas at MoMA

During an overflow lecture last night at MoMA in advance of her retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave, Marlene Dumas said it's not as gloomy as the title sounds; her pictures are often about the nature of painting and in some sense the measure of the grave is the size of the canvas. She believes her figures are "very aware" that they are two dimensional creations in a painting. She added, "I'm not Dr. Frankenstein. I don't think I'm going to create this being that's 'Alive!'"

Also, I should mention, some of her subjects are corpses. Her starting points for paintings are usually old photos, including those of dead bodies, though viewers could read several as sleeping. Her portraits of men and children are startling, yet the media obsesses on her depictions of prostitutes and her inspiration from pornography (which she calls "my angrily friendly works"), because she is a woman.

In fact, her picture The Visitor holds the world record for the highest price paid for work by a living female artist, $6.3 million. For comparison, the highest price paid for a painting by a living male artist is $85.6 million, for Jasper Johns' False Start.

Born and raised in South Africa, a longtime resident of Amsterdam, the fifty-five year old Dumas seems naturally at ease with gay topics and male sexuality, even at an early age. She showed a video clip of Gilbert & George explaining their methods and nodded vigorously when they said they might keep an image five or six years before they knew how to use it. Discussing a painting by Caravaggio, she said, "He loved men. So he places these beautiful big male figures in front, and only puts the woman, tiny, here in back."

She surprised some listeners last night by saying, "Sometimes I think I'm not a real artist because I'm too half-hearted and never know where I am." 

The show, which opens on Wednesday to members and on Sunday to the public, will be up through February 16.

Strong Women Weekend: Pray the Devil Back to Hell

NOT a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. Enduring fifteen years of civil war, starvation, and horrific attacks, Christian churchwomen in Liberia demanded peace. Muslim women joined them. The murderous dictatorship under Charles Taylor, and the brutal rebels who enlisted boys whom they hooked on drugs and gave machine guns, ignored them. How the women eventually won is the subject of this rousing documentary, longlisted for an Oscar. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is especially relevant for anyone thinking about the Prop 8 protests, because these women brought colossal change from a position of poverty, without money, education, influence, connection, or any chance of success. As Leymah Gwobee says, "I had a crazy dream." Very inspiring.

Strong Women Weekend: Tina Turner

When I'm on my deathbed, please say, "December 6, 2008," to remind me I've already seen heaven: a Tina Turner concert from the second row, on the aisle.

Why does Tina hold at least two Guinness World Records? Technically, because she has sold more concert tickets than any other solo act [two of her tours both reached four million people] and because she attracted the largest paying crowd for a single performer at one show, more than 186,000 in Rio's Maracana Stadium. But really it's her voice and her energy, still superhumanly strong even though the day after Thanksgiving she turned sixty-nine. She's playing eighty-one dates in a six month tour throughout North America and Europe. Set list of twenty-one songs here. Hartford was her last U.S. stop. See her now or regret it.