Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 10

A must read

This is a hilarious synopsis of a gladiator movie you NEED to read, over at Band of Thebes.

A poem to celebrate New York's new gay marriage law

I've posted this before but I never tire from it.  Congrats to all your New York lovebirds out there.

TREE MARRIAGE

In Chota Nagpur and Bengal

the betrothed are tied with threads to

mango trees, they marry the trees

as well as one another, and

the two trees marry each other.

Could we do that some time with oaks

or beeches? This gossamer we

hold each other with, this web

of love and habit is not enough.

In mistrust of heavier ties,

I would like tree-siblings for us,

standing together somewhere, two

trees married with us, lightly, their

fingers barely touching in sleep,

our threads invisible but holding.

– William Meredith

Gay novelists talk "gay writing" and "gay writers"

This "Gay Writer" thing is being talked about all over the place lately!  The most recent is a podcast you can listen to over at the Guardian:

"Good writing is good writing, but the beauty of gay literature is there's an affinity with, theme, concept, sensibility,  there's a sense of understanding that can implicit, explicit…"

They write:

In this week's podcast we continue our inquiry into the politics of fiction by asking if the gay novel can make a difference. We head off to Soho to ask people about the books that changed their lives, and talk to Max Shaefer, whose word-of-mouth success Children of the Sun looks at homosexuality in the National Front.

With us in the studio are three of today's gay novelists. Stella Duffy explains why, though she's happy to be out, she hates to be pigeonholed, and why feminism is more important to her than sexual identity. Neil Bartlett and Paul Burston explain why they keep returning to historical themes – whether it's Burston's new romantics or Bartlett's innocents from the 1960s.

Publishers ignoring lesbian writers

Publishers ignoring lesbian writers.

An important article by my good friend, poet and scholar Julie Enszer

Franco's Crane biopic 'akin to listening to poetry you don't much like.'

I don't know if James Franco's Hart Crane film is any good, but The Hollywood Reporter critic slams it.  And gets in a dig at poetry in the process. Typical. Here's the end of the review:

"Instead, it's mostly a tedious chore, much akin to listening poetry you don't much like. Without a text or expert to guide you, Crane's poetry is tough to gasp—he admitted it himself—which, minus any involving drama having been developed, is true for this film as well."

The reviewer also talks about "the gay angle" and Crane as poet.

"Franco's name will get this around to various festivals and perhaps into very limited specialized release where the gay angle will help, but genuine enthusiasm will be scarce. The imposing impenetrability of his notably ahead-of-its-time poetry notwithstanding, Hart Crane led a life so impassioned, questing and intense that it's surprising the story has been ignored this long. Had Ken Russell ever chosen to make a film about an American poet, he could have created a really demented gay fantasia about him, to borrow Tony Kushner's subtitle for 'Angels in America.'"

More talk of gay and their love of books!

In response to the recent Best Books list over at the Good Men Project, the folks over at Autostraddle want to know:

"What is it about us, and about books? Why do they speak to us when nothing else does? What's your number one gay book of all time, and why does it mean so much to you?"

[The article also talks about the gay community, what that means for different people, and how the list generated a tiny controversy.]

Surf on over to check out all the comments (lots of them) in response.  If anyone hits up something they'd like to share in the comments space here, it would be much appreciated, as always.

Allan Hollinghurst and 'Sex on the Brain'

From the Guardian: "Alan Hollinghurst: Sex on the brain—He had trouble publishing his explicit first book, but by 2004 he'd won the Booker prize. Alan Hollinghurst talks about living alone, the allure of the upper classes and why he's not just a 'gay writer' any more."

A section to interest you:

One question he refuses to engage with is whether he is still pigeonholed as a gay writer. This was the canard that followed him on his promotional tour for The Line Of Beauty, when interviewers asked whether his gayness defined him as a writer and every news piece was headlined, "Gay writer wins Booker". "I have a feeling it's changed," he says. "I spent 20 years politely answering the question, 'How do you feel when people categorise you as a gay writer?' and I'm not going to do it this time round. It's no longer relevant."

Can he imagine writing a book with no gay characters or gay themes? Pause. "I still slightly feel there are a lot of those around already, and I'm not sure my heart would be completely in it." He has embarked on his next novel, and says it will "certainly have a gay strand in it, though the protagonists will all be more or less heterosexual." The "more or less" is significant: sexuality in Hollinghurst's world is fluid. "There's a lot in The Stranger's Child which is rather liminal," he says. "There's quite a lot of bisexuality. One of the ideas of the book is about the unknowability or uncategorisability of human behaviour, and I was rather tempted into those ambiguous sexual areas."

He was never a writer of manifestos, but his early novels were to some extent conscious efforts to bring gay writing and gay life into the mainstream. That phase is now over. "With the first book, I was deliberately choosing the subject of the homosexual world and history. Now books come upon me in a more sly and roundabout way. Themes emerge in the process of writing." But some of the old imperatives still assert themselves. "Sexual behaviour, sexual mores and sexual psychology are fascinating, and I will always write about them." Hollinghurst's mania for honesty means that intellect, the hankering for order and beauty, will always be subverted by the messy realities of desire.

From bringing gay literature to the mainstream to saying we're past that phase in a couple of decades. Maybe the Brits are beyond us here, but that seems awfully tidy to me. Just saying.  To be clear, THE LINE OF BEAUTY rocks.

Gay couple's estate to fund arts prizes

Yes, please.   (Of course, poetry once again draws the short straw.)

Yale University is announcing the establishment of some of the most lucrative literary prizes in America.

Called the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes, they will be given annually starting in late 2012 or early 2013, with seven to nine grants of $150,000 each awarded to playwrights and writers of fiction and nonfiction. Awards for poetry may be added later at the discretion of the awards committee.

And at the end of the article:

"Mr. Windham and Sandy Campbell, his companion of 45 years, were a well-known couple in New York's gay literary circles who lived so unostentatiously that it surprised their friends that Mr. Windham left a bequest sufficient to generate a million dollars in prize money every year."

A new photo blog to check out

Woolf and Wilde, which I came across totally on chance, combines vintage photos of 'queer' embrace and the like with texts from gay and lesbian authors or somehow otherwise queer. (Some queer theorist out there is groaning. Whatev. It's a photo blog!)  Surf on over! Note: some of the photos might be NSFW, believe it or not.  Those olden time folks had racy photos, too!

A recent photo of two men wrestling was coupled with this poem from Mutsuo Takahashi:

You are a murderer

No you are not, but really a wrestler

Either way it's just the same

For from the ring of your entangled body

Clean as leather, lustful as a lily

Will nail me down

On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons

The thoughtful forehead

(In fact, it's thinking nothing)

When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids

Inside, a dark forest awakens

A forest of red parrots

Seven almonds and grape leaves

At the end of the forest a vine

Covers the house where two boys

Lie in each others arms: I'm one of them, you the other

In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety

Outside the keyhole, a sunset

Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo

Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst

Falling, falling, a gymnast

If you're going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler

 

 

Finally, someone who's happy to call herself a queer poet!

Okay, okay, I know lots of us are okay with such terms, but it is nice to see it in print once in a while.

The Literateur interviews Brit Sophie Mayer and includes a sizeable chat about queer/gay poetry.  Check out these moments below and then click to read the whole piece. Mayer's most recent book is The Private Parts of Girls, and she's the commissioning editor for the UK's Chroma queer arts journal.

Mayer: As for the straightness or queerness of poetry, it is equally fraught, but there is a conservative tradition in which epic and lyric are not only read as straight, but written to enforce compulsory heterosexuality. The blazon, in which the male poet strips and divides up the female muse, is a key example (and here is where feminism and queer theory cross wires and spark for me). The unitary white middle-class masculine pose of authority is ingrained in Western culture – and at the same time, it is challenged from the start of written poetry, whether in Sumeria or ancient Greece; challenged again even at the core of the tradition in Shakespeare's queer sonnets with their sinuous blur of second-person address and theatrical role play across genders.

But how many people are taught the queerness of the lyric tradition at school? For me, the label 'queer poetry' is useful as a stance against the suppression of such subversive histories and presents. It might allow a reader emerging from such absences in their education to discover much-needed allies, much as I made a beeline for Women's Press and Virago books as a teenager. It might give them a way of naming feelings for which they have been told to feel ashamed. At the same time, the label is provocative and political in claiming an allegiance to generations of writers whose work matters hugely to me, from Katharine Phillips to Chrystos. For all three of those reasons, I'm proud to be called/call myself a queer poet, and my poetry queer poetry (although I am always aware of the gap between the two, and of their unstable meaning).

'Queer' started out as a politics of interpretation celebrating such instability of meaning, as a way of handing power to the reader in engaging with the text – but it also offered a way for writers to claim a community, tradition and openness. It's associated, for me, with a lineage from Sappho to Gertrude Stein, who not only lived an openly lesbian life but refused the straightness of syntax. It's that formal and structural challenge, as much as the re-visioning of content and excavation of untold stories, that signals 'queer' for me.