Pamela Aidan’s Darcy Trilogy: A Review Monday, Aug 13 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 7:04 pm

coverOver the past few weeks I’ve been reading Pamela Aidan’s “Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman” trilogy: An Assembly Such as This, Duty and Desire, and These Three Remain (pictured here). These books retell the story of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy’s point of view.

Aidan has done a remarkable job of maintaining the spirit and character of Austen’s novel while adding original material of her own. As somewhat of a purist, I would have enjoyed a little less of the latter, but I really enjoyed all three books. They’re all good reading.

An Assembly Such as This relates Mr. Darcy’s viewpoint during his visit to Netherfield. Throughout this first volume, Aidan skillfully recreates Austen’s scenes — the public ball, Jane’s illness and Elizabeth’s subsequent visit at Netherfield, and Mr. Bingley’s ball. I was definitely impressed by her ability to retain much of Austen’s dialogue while creating a full-fledged and believable character in her version of Mr. Darcy. Of the three volumes, this one follows Austen’s original most closely; I found it very enjoyable.

The second volume, Duty and Desire, traces Mr. Darcy’s struggle to overcome his feelings for Elizabeth after leaving Netherfield. In this book, Aidan moves away from mimicking Austen’s plot, dialogue, and characters by filling in the “silent time” of Austen’s novel (as the back of the book says). Trying to get over his interest in Elizabeth, Darcy spends the novel pushing Bingley away from his love for Jane, keeping a watchful eye on his sister, Georgiana, and attending various social events for the London elite, including a country gathering at Norwycke Castle, the home of one of his old Cambridge buddies, a party that nearly turns disastrous for our leading man.

Aidan does a particularly good job of creating a rounder version of Georgiana than Austen provides. She also creates a new character, Lord Dy Brougham, another of Darcy’s college friends. I liked this volume the least of the three, however, since it departs the most from Austen’s original. I especially found the chapters on Darcy’s visit to Norwycke to find some other woman to love a bit tedious and drawn out. Some mystical elements are also introduced into the plot; I ultimately lost interest in this plot line and ultimately couldn’t keep the characters straight — there are several original male and female characters in this section. For someone like me, this novel is mostly filler — the stuff that happens before we get back to the real story.

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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: A Review Tuesday, Aug 7 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 8:56 pm

Batman coverI’m a little late to the party, but over the past weekend I read Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knights Returns, first published in 1986. As I’ve written about previously, the first (and until now only) graphic novel I’ve finished was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which is an amazing book. I then started to read about graphic novels in general, picked up a few particular novels, and briefly thought about teaching one of my summer classes on graphic novels by women (I’m teaching a course on Women & Writing and one on Women & Literature).

PJ has been into graphic literature much longer than I have. He read comics as a kid and started reading recent classics — such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Maus — a few years ago. He therefore wanted to encourage my new interest and so he purchased Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and Paul Gravett’s Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life. I had read about the latter one online, so I was really excited when he bought it.

Gravett quotes Stephen King, who asserts, that Miller’s Batman is “probably the finest piece of comic art ever to be published in a popular edition” (78). It is an amazing text.

Not having been much of a comics reader when I was a kid, it took me a little while to decipher the codes on how to read this text. It’s very sophisticated and postmodern. Miller tends to pack as much information in as few frames as possible, which can disorient the reader, forcing him or her to make connections and fill in blanks. The images in the novel are also sophisticated, and Miller uses a variety of colors, styles, and techniques to relate different moods in different parts of the story. (I was so excited when I finally noticed — well into the book — that he color codes character’s thought boxes: Batman’s are grey, Superman’s are blue, and the Joker’s are green, for example.) He also plays with perspective, which he often uses to build suspense and excitement. Everything works together to tell a great story.

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Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife: A Review Sunday, Jul 22 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 8:01 pm

For each of the last few summers, I’ve read a Jane Austen novel. I usually take whichever one I’m reading with me on the plane to Europe: Emma to London, Pride and Prejudice to Spain. Later this summer, I’ll be teaching Persuasion, so I was going to read that, but I decided to vary the routine a bit this year and read one of the recent books that either continues or rewrites Pride and Prejudice instead.

Darcy Takes a WifeI chose Linda Berdoll’s Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, a continuation of Pride and Prejudice. It’s quite long, 465 pages, so I read it before we left for Paris rather than take it with me.

The novel begins the day after Mr. Darcy’s wedding to Elizabeth Bennett. As they ride in a carriage from London, where they spent their first night together, Elizabeth is in some discomfort but too embarrassed to accept her new husband’s offer of a pillow. We then enter Elizabeth’s memory as she recalls how she came by her discomfort.

This recollection points to what distinguishes this book: Berdoll more than peeks behind the Darcys’ bed curtains; she gives us graphic account (after graphic account) of their love making. It turns out that Darcy and Elizabeth are quite enthusiastic in their marital union. Anyone looking for a steamy rewriting of Austen need look no further: Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife is very much a romance novel set in the social world created by the decidedly non-sexy Austen.

Berdoll’s world is populated by all of the characters that make Austen’s novel such a treat. Besides Darcy and Elizabeth, we see Bingley and Jane (their wedding night and subsequent sexual activities are less competent than D&E’s), Wickham and Lydia (who almost immediately tire of one another’s company), the other Bennets, Mr. Collins and Charlotte, and even Lady Catherine de Bourgh (we don’t get any part of her sex life, fortunately!).

Much of Berdoll’s continuation fits well with Austen. Bingley, for example, is sexually inexperienced and rather incompetent at first in making love to his wife. This fits well with my vision of the character from Pride and Prejudice. Lady Catherine remains a dour figure staunchly opposed to her nephew’s marriage to his social inferior. Mr. Collins is still a buffoon, and Lydia and Wickham’s scenes perfectly match Austen’s foreshadowing.

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Teaching Tristram Shandy Sunday, May 13 2007 

books and movies and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:34 am

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been teaching Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It’s not a novel that I ever thought that I would teach. I embarrassingly admit that I hated it when I was in graduate school — I’m much more of a Richardson fan; I like the more traditional realist novel. But when I was creating the syllabus for my HTC class, I decided that it was about time I teach one of the great mid-century novels that I had never taught before. It was either Tristram or Tom Jones. I obviously picked the former.

On the whole, I’m glad I taught it. It’s certainly one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read, much less taught. (Why do I keep hearing the punchline, “Read it? I haven’t even taught it yet!” in my head?!) We spent two weeks on the novel. Even though this is an honors class, that was really pushing it, I think. On the one hand, my students had to read a lot of difficult material in a relatively short time. On the other hand, at least they don’t have to spend any more time on it if they didn’t like it!

We read the first five volumes of the novel the first week. I also brought in excerpts from Melvin New’s Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969) to illustrate one of the foundational readings of the novel. His emphasis on the text as satire helped us link it back to Pope and Swift, who we had just read the week before. We finished the book for week two, watched the 2005 movie adaptation, I presented them with excerpts from Dennis Allen’s “Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy,” published in Studies in English Literature in 1985, and they each wrote a 5-page essay on it. I used Allen’s article to illustrate more recent trends in criticism and it certainly does — lots of gender and sexual stuff. (My students have stopped being surprised that the eighteenth century is so bawdy!) I also got to explain signs, signifiers, and signifieds, which is always fun!

I can’t claim to have any great insight into Tristram Shandy, and I’m pretty sure I don’t understand much of it. But it is a great work, and I’ve decided to give it a go in my regular eighteenth-century lit class. I’m not at all confident that it’s going to go well, but I want to keep teaching it until I feel like I have some sort of handle on it. (I realize that I might retire first, though!) Tristram is a novel that teaches its readers to read differently — it defies linear reading practices and the expectations of a typical realist novel.

Several of my students wrote reviews of the movie for their tutorial paper last week. Here’s the trailer:

I first saw this movie in Montreal. At the time, I didn’t really care much for it, since I thought it could have followed the novel more closely. But, since we were reading it, I figured it would be good to show it to my students and let them decide for themselves whether it was a good adaptation or not.

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Teaching Curious Wine Thursday, Apr 19 2007 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:14 pm

This week, I taught Katherine Forrest’s Curious Wine in my GLBT lit course. It’s about a group of women who are staying in a cabin on Lake Tahoe over a long weekend. The main character, Diana Holland, becomes “drawn” to one of the other women, Lane Christianson, and the two soon take their love of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to new heights of mutual discovery.

For the most part, my students were unimpressed. I tried to talk about the novel as lesbian romance. We discussed its evocation of a specific time, 1978. And we talked about it in terms of second wave feminism. Still, they were mostly unimpressed.

I really like Curious Wine. I think it’s sweet and romantic. And it’s a good read. As we continued to discuss it, it became clear that one of the issues many of the students had with the novel is its description of lesbian sex. Here’s a brief example:

She gasped from fingers touching lightly, gently inside her thighs, and pleasure and desire came together and focused intensely, powerfully. Her body surged against Lane, her breath coming quickly, her body trembling as Lane’s hands began to pull down her pajamas.

While I think this language is fairly evocative, my students found it too flowery, euphemistic, and elliptical. As we talked more about it, the word that eventually summed up their reaction was “unrealistic.” They wanted a more realistic portrayal of how real people have sex.

Chrystos So, on Wednesday I brought in a poem that I thought that they would like, “I Suck” by Chrystos, pictured here. I love this poem. It graphically and playfully presents two women’s sex together. It’s a fun poem, a hot poem, and an artistic poem. Its language is both very concrete and very “poetic.” You know exactly what’s happening in the poem and exactly which body parts it’s happening to. But it’s also very much a poem — word choice, imagery, and rhythm all work together to create a desire representational effect. It is a fabulous poem.

Needless to say, my students loved it. This is apparently what they’ve been waiting for — explicit, realistic lesbian sex!

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Teaching Stone Butch Blues Wednesday, Apr 11 2007 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 6:07 pm

Stone Butch BluesToday I finished teaching Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues in my Lesbian & Gay Lit class. I have to admit that I’m frustrated with teaching this novel. I’ve taught it 4 or 5 times in the past 6 years, and I seem to have the same issues each time I assign it.

It’s unquestionably one of the most important GLBT novels ever written, and I sincerely love it. Perhaps more than any other book I teach, it’s a wise novel and an educational novel. Students can’t possibly come away from reading it without learning a lot about transgender issues, gender issues, race issues, class issues, and just life in general.

But there are also problems with teaching it. My biggest gripe is that this novel always seems too difficult to get. This year, for example, I had wanted to start my class with Blues, since it provides such a rich sense of history; I thought it would be a great way to get into the subject matter of our course (post-Stonewall GLT lit — we’re not really doing any bi stuff). But several of my students couldn’t get a copy of the book during the first week or two of class because there weren’t enough copies at the bookstores. This is the second time in three years that my students have had trouble buying it. I assume this difficulty comes from the fact that everybody teaches it, making it difficult for the publisher to keep it stocked and for bookstores to get enough used copies. But it’s so frustrating to have to reorder the syllabus — and thus disrupt my perfectly arranged reading list — in order to give students enough time to get copies of the novel.

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Teaching Faggots by Larry Kramer Wednesday, Apr 4 2007 

academia and books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 5:56 pm

Today I taught excerpts from Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots in my Lesbian & Gay Lit course. For the past couple of years I have taught the entire novel in the class, but this time I decided to teach only a small section — mostly the first 30 pages or so — in order to make room for Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart and Wayne Hoffman’s 2006 novel Hard. I’m looking forward to teaching those works for the first time, but I definitely wish I had been able to keep all of Faggots on the reading list.

Faggots Faggots follows its “hero,” Fred Lemish, as he maneuvers his way through the gay scene of 1970s New York City. The novel is extremely graphic and includes detailed descriptions of felching, anal sex, water sports, rimming, douching, oral sex, incest, group sex, S/M, and fisting. Ultimately, Kramer’s point in this novel is to critique the endless and often anonymous sexual encounters of many gay men in the 70s, arguing that this lifestyle is destroying their chances of living more normal, fulfilling, and loving lives.

Not surprisingly, Kramer took a lot of heat for this critique. Here’s what one reviewer writes about the novel:

Kramer has attempted to write a comic sex novel; his model, it is clear, is Portnoy to Holleran’s Gatsby. However, combining intense, John Rechy-type sexual explicitness with broad, crack-timed humor requires the technique of an expert writer, and Kramer is anything but. So his jokes stiff, and his porn goes limp. In fact, he does almost everything wrong. He creates too many characters and gives them farcical names like Randy Dildough and Yootha Truth, so you don’t take them seriously; but then he keeps bringing them back and asking you to care about them when you can’t even remember who they are. He delivers his wit and wisdom in subtle, clever statements like this: “Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York City area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks.” He rushes his characters from orgy to orgy with increasingly unfunny running gags in a way that suggests what might happen if Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw were made into a sitcom by Terrence (The Ritz) McNally.

I don’t really agree with this writer. While its true that Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance is a much more lyrical book, Faggots makes a much more pointed critique. It’s much more like eighteenth-century satire — think Jonathan Swift — than Dancer is. If we read it from this point of view, I think it has a lot to say to us about a certain portion of 1970s gay male NYC culture as well as about our own attitudes to that past and what’s happened since.

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A Seahorse Year: A Review Tuesday, Mar 6 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 10:04 pm

This past weekend I led our GLBT book club in a discussion of Stacey D’Erasmo’s A Seahorse Year. I hadn’t read the book before; after reading it, I looked forward to hearing what the undergraduates had to say about it.

A Seahorse Yearis about what happens to a non-traditional family when their 16-year-old son is diagnosed with schizophrenia. The son, Christopher, disappears one day. He turns up later, but unfortunately the family’s nightmare is just beginning.

The narrative is told from individual characters’ points of view. As a result, we get inside their heads, but only for brief moments. Otherwise, the narrative is relatively fractured. Our understanding of what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what the consequences are is only partial. In many ways, it’s a fairly realist, because it’s a (mildly) postmodern narrative.

What I really like about this book is its overall point of view. I’m not quite the same age as the parents, but I could really identify with their basic existence. In a sense, they each — the two lesbian moms, Nan and Marina, and the biological father, Hal, who inseminated Nan using a syringe — wake up one day and wonder how they got where they are: How did they end up in the relationships they’re in? Do they want to stay in them? What do they want in life?

I think there are days when one wakes up — either literally or figuratively — and is suddenly confronted by one’s life choices. It doesn’t mean that you don’t love your partner (or whoever) but it does mean that you suddenly see yourself in a different way. You see that you’re no longer the person you were when you were 22 and that so much of your life is over. You begin to ask whether this is the life you had intended, if this is really what you want. A Seahorse Year really captures that sense of being middle aged, for lack of any better descriptor.

So, in sum, I really liked the book’s realistic portrayal of how these people react to their lives and the difficulties of suddenly discovering that your son is seriously disturbed. (more…)

 

Favorite Books of 2006 Friday, Feb 23 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 5:03 pm

Although PJ insists that I didn’t read much last year, I did in fact read quite a few books, certainly enough to have a top 5 list. (But I’m only including books that were actually published in 2006 on the list.)

  1. Fun Home: By far, the best book I read last year was Alison Bechdel’s memoir about her relationship with her father. I’ve already blogged about it, so I’ll just refer here to my previous post. But again, it’s a great, great book.
  2. Hard: The best gay novel I read last year was Wayne Hoffman’s Hard. My previous post about it is here.
  3. The Last Time I Saw You: Rebecca Brown’s collection of short stories is amazing. I’ve decided that I won’t be teaching it next quarter in my Lesbian & Gay Lit course because I don’t think it fits with the other texts we’ll be reading, but I might teach it in my Women & Writing class over the summer. I’ve written about this book here.
  4. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism: This book by historian Judith Bennett is the best academic book I read in 2006. (Actually, I’m still reading it, but it came out last year so I’m counting it here.) It’s a study of feminism, women’s history, and the discipline of historical studies. It’s very well written (not “academic” at all — in a good way) and I really like her perspective on the issues of patriarchy, feminism, and history. I’m also thinking about this book for my Women & Writing class this summer. Her chapter on patriarchy is simply foundational for any class that deals with “the patriarchy” as a topic. I highly recommend it.
  5. I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir: The best traditional-form memoir that I read last year is John Kilmer-Purcell’s book about his days as a boozing drag queen with a hooker drug addicted boyfriend. It’s a real page turner, to say the least. In the post-James Frey world, I guess we’re all sceptical of outlandish memoirs, but even if this book were all a fiction it would still be a great read. It reminds me quite a bit of Augusten Burroughs’ memoirs — maybe gay men are getting into a rut when it comes to memoir as a genre, or maybe this means that there’s a market for these kinds of books and that’s why they’re getting published. Regardless, I Am Not Myself These Days is an entertaining read.

I guess the most disappointing book I read last year was Leslie Feinberg’s Drag King Dreams. Well, I haven’t actually finished it yet. And I really don’t think it’s Feinberg’s fault that I’m not enjoying it — how many people write two masterpieces in one lifetime? Stone Butch Blues is one of the most amazing books ever written; it’s undoubtedly impossible to live up to that standard every time Feinberg writes a book.

I guess I need to get to a book store soon to start on 2007’s books! Any recommendations?

 

Fun Home: A Review Friday, Jan 12 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 2:24 pm

I’ve just finished reading Alison Bechdel‘s graphic novel/non-fiction text, Fun Home. Bechdel is already kind of famous for her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. Fun Home promises to make her one of the most important GLBT writers working today. It is an amazing book. I urge anyone who enjoys reading to rush out and get it.

Fun Home cover Fun Home is, on one level, Bechdel’s effort to come to terms with her father, a high school English teacher/funeral home director in small town Pennsylvania who also restores old homes to museum-like quality on the side. Already strained, their relationship is made more complicated by the fact that Alison’s father is hiding a substantial secret, one that she only discovers after leaving home for college. Part homage to her father, part indictment of him, Fun Home is both the particular story of these two characters’ relationship and a universal story of the constant renegotiation of the parent-child relationship as the child grows into adulthood.

There are many things that recommend this book. I should first admit that this is the first graphic novel (or autobiography or memoir — whatever the correct genre is) that I’ve read. My assumptions about graphic novels have all been upended by this book. I assumed they were rather basic and intellectually unengaging. If Fun Home is any indication, these assumptions are clearly wrong.

Bechdel uses the graphic elements of her medium to create a rich and intellectually engaging text in which words and images play off of one another. Early in the work an image includes a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that at first glance appears to be just a random book lying next to a character. As we continue reading, however, we realize that this image is actually an inter-text, a literary reference that guides the reader’s expectations of Bechdel’s story. This is just one of the many ways that she uses the graphic medium successfully to add to the reader’s engagement with her text.

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