Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 22

Hide/Seek censorship issue taken up by "New Republic"

I find this reasoning moronic and offensive. Read the rest for the author's "Not that I agree with the Right either" blather.

There is a Wikileaks crudity about the way the "Hide/Seek" affair is unfolding, a delight in dumping everybody's secrets out in public and letting the chips fall as they may. The curators of "Hide/Seek," Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Wood, have apparently never encountered a hidden or nuanced aspect of an artistic personality that they did not believe ought to be given some boldface attention. Is their point that the elusive eroticism of Thomas Eakins, Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Djuna Barnes, and Joseph Cornell is as American as apple pie? And given that Katz and Wood want to "out" American art, is it any wonder that Eric Cantor, the rockstar Republican congressman with the square jaw and the wire-frame specs, turned up on Fox News to announce that the show was an "outrageous use of taxpayer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season?" It is one of the strange and sad facts of the culture wars that the opponents so often speak the same language of "outing" and "outrageousness," while the withering of American cultural life continues unabated. The other day I visited Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, where Walt Whitman, the gay poet who hid his outrageousness in plain sight, is buried in an archaic stone monument of his own design. To reach the last resting place of the great bard of democratic possibility, you drive through Camden's battered streets, and you may well find yourself clinging to Whitman's belief that every man and woman and child can have their "imaginative individual responses"—indeed naturally does have such a response.

Rane Arroyo: call for contributions

Got this from a listserv I'm on:

Call for Contributions:

Collection in Memory of Rane Arroyo

Submissions of any genre are invited for an edited collection in memory of poet and playwright Rane Arroyo (1954-2010). His 11 books of poetry, collection of short stories, and numerous plays and performances blazed new trails in Puerto Rican / American literature in their blending of so-called "high" and "low" cultures, their frank reflections on homosexuality, ethnicity, and social class, and their experimentation and self-reflexivity. Rane won numerous accolades during his lifetime and was respected and loved by many, particularly those students and authors whom he influenced and inspired.

Rane was unafraid to push and blur boundaries, and this collection  seeks to honor him and his courage by doing the same. To that end, I welcome any sort of contribution in any genre and from any perspective that you feel appropriate to the occasion and to the memory of Rane Arroyo. This may include, but is certainly not limited to, "traditional" (or not-so-traditional) literary criticism, poems or other creative works, personal essays, reflections on teaching Rane's work, and more. Essays of literary criticism should be approximately 6,000-8,000 words in length,  including end notes and a list of works cited that follows the norms of the  Modern Language Association. Other submissions may be in any format. Please feel free to include images, especially if you own them and can grant copyright permission. Images of Rane are certainly welcomed, as are any other images that might be pertinent to your submission.

Interest in submitting should be expressed via email to sewanee.edu> (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail)

no later than March 31, 2011. Please indicate what you plan to submit

and, if appropriate, a title and brief abstract. Final submissions will be due no later than May 31, 2011.

Oh, for the days of humor in theory

"In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them."

–  Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes Towards a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sex"

Do you know a theorist who has a sense of humor?  Share!

Swooooon

Nuff. Said.  I ain't cold no more.

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As Meat Loves Salt

One author describes her 'guilty pleasure' in this NPR audio — a book set during England's Civil War, where two soldiers fall in love.   Well, alllll right!

Paperboy

From the Guardian (full article here)

Christopher Fowler's memoir of a lonely 1960s childhood, Paperboy, has been awarded the inaugural Green Carnation prize, set up this year to celebrate fiction and memoirs written by gay men.

Fowler's memoir recounts the tale of a suburban London boy who divides his time between the cinema and the library, devouring stories and taking refuge from a tense family environment in the world of words. The prize panel called the book "beautifully written", and "a rich and astute evocation of a time and a place", recalling a childhood "at once eccentric and endearingly ordinary." Chair of the judges, novelist Paul Magrs, said Paperboy was "about the forming of a gay sensibility – but more than that, it's about the growth of a reader and a wonderfully generous and inventive writer".

A poem for World AIDS Day

I saw this on David Groff's Facebook page and had to post today, World AIDS Day.  Of course this in memory of all those we've lost.

December 1989

The nascent winter turns

Each root into a nail,

And in the West there burns

A sun morbid and pale.

Now, from the city bars

We drift, into a cool

Gymnasium of stars–

The drunkard and the fool:

Into the night we go,

Finding our separate ways–

The darkness fraught with snow,

The leaves falling like days.

–Adam Johnson, from Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS

Become a fan of the book on Facebook and learn more by clicking that link!

Book list: GLBT authors pick their faves

It's the time of year for lists!  Oh, I love 'em. And Band of Thebes has an awesome one!  — The Best LGBT Books of 2010: 80 Authors Select Their Favorites. I've cut and pasted (below) just four of the dozens and dozens of favorite titles.

WOULD LOVE FOR YOU TO ADD YOUR OWN PERSONAL FAVORITES TO the comments section! And if you're a blogger, perhaps you'd like to vote for your favorite book over at this Blogger's Choice GLBT lit. awards (which I have to admit I know nothing about).

Rigoberto González, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa:

Steven Cordova, Long Distance. A book of poetry that's also a personal exploration of one gay man's identity as a New Yorker and a person living with HIV. The body and anti-body coexist within the larger body of the city–the muse that inspires verse from every unexpected encounter at every familiar street.

Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess:

The best book of the year is Eileen Myles' Inferno: A Poets Novel. Two other fine novels: Daniel Allen Cox' Krakow Melt and Robin and Ruby by K.M. Soehnlein. And more poetry—Tony Leuzzi's Radiant Losses; Jeffrey Jullich: Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis; and Other Flowers, previously uncollected poems by the late James Schuyler. Four 2010 biographies of unconventional entertainers—Sam Irvin's Kay Thompson, Justin Spring's Secret Historian, Michael Michaud's Sal Mineo, and Jeff Gordon's Foxy Lady: The Authorized Biography of Lynn Bari—duke it out on my bookshelves. I actually don't know if biographer Jeff Gordon is gay, but if he's not, I'm Mary Queen of Scots.

Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Hotel Theory:

James Schuyler, Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet.  The great Schuyler is dead, and won't be writing any new books;  let's treasure this last bouquet of remnants, flights, experiments, slumbers, asides, still lives, epistles, and contemplations.  From "Stele":  "I will suck you off in Athens / and carry your seed in my mouth / to your friend in Syracuse."

Emanuel Xavier, author of If Jesus Were Gay & Other Poems

James Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings edited and with an introduction by Randall Keenan is my favorite LGBT book of 2010.  Provocative and prophetic, this collection features essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews from one of the most inspiring literary figures of our community.  It's quite fascinating to read his thoughts on everything from the possibility of an African-American president to the hypocrisy of religious fundamentalism to the black church in America.

Gay Pirates (not a joke)

This is a lovely song/video from a new name to me, Cosmo Jarvis, who is nice on both the ears and eyes. I thought it was going to be mocking or at least just silly.   But it's quite touching, a bit raucous, a great tune, and even brought me to tears.  May be considered NSFW at one point.

"It's you m'love./ You're my land a'hoy. / You're my boy!"

"I'd be under the sea / But you hold me above./ 'Cause you're the man I love."

WE ARE LOVERS IN A YANKEE CANDLE SHOP

WE ARE LOVERS IN A YANKEE CANDLE SHOP (poem in process)

 

We are two men shopping

for aromatic identities—

mine, a buttery shortbread,

yours, a blackened butch patchouli.



We do this monthly. Period.

We do this visibly. Serious.

Kin and among those who protect us:

left-over mothers, the lonely, and the shy teenage girl.

We are aware of the word We

only when (and not even then)

we can't agree on which jar

would and should go in which room

of the home we share.

In an ecstasy (as in derangement)

of sense and in the romance

of waxen typology (we

are all our own museums),

our sense of small disappears

as our bodies knows around

for a lifted lid, a hole to hid.

Then you pick up a bottle of oils,

and your hand is coated

with something foreign to the blithe

pout of a Yankee Candle.

I call it smegmatic. It marks us

as having needed to have been

cleaned, or worse detersive

in our very we. We are sanitized.

Two faggots shopping, sweating

soap to hide their merry prank

against nature.

How ridiculous this is

how I think.  No one is less aware

of two men shopping for candles

than we were before we weren't,

which was always bound to happen.

I pull out our coupon—buy two gays, get two

free—when I realize I have jars

in hand. I've misread

the the very air

and will now

have to pay

full price.