What I’m Reading: The Great Fire of London Thursday, Jan 4 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 11:35 am

I’ve started reading several Restoration-related books with the intention of reviewing each of them once I’m done. However, since I seem to keep starting new ones before finishing the old ones, I thought I’d go ahead and write about some of them as readings-in-progress.

Fire of London The first is Stephen Porter’s The Great Fire of London (Sutton Publishing, 1996). The Great Fire occured in 1666, “raged for our days and destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 of the City of London’s great livery halls.” It is one of the most important disasters in British history and had a profound effect on the subsequent development of London as a city. Most students of Restoration literature are familiar with Samuel Pepys’s narration of the fire in his Diary.

Porter’s The Great Fire of London begins by surveying the dangers of fire in 1660s London and recounting the precautions people took to avoid these dangers. One of the things I’ve already learned from reading it is just how prevalent fires were in the seventeenth century. Like so many disasters throughout history, this one was not unforeseen nor did it come out of no where. I’ve also been interested to learn about fire fighting techniques (if that phrase isn’t a misnomer) in 1660s London — let’s just say that they were surprisingly rudimentary and chaotic compared to those of the other great cities of Europe at the time.

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Lesbian Fiction: Curious Tea Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:19 am

Over the past week, I’ve read two novels that I enjoyed very much: Katherine Forrest‘s Curious Wine and Michelle Tea‘s Valencia. I’m making a concerted effort to read some lesbian fiction over the next several weeks in preparation for my Lesbian and Gay Lit class in the spring.

When I read my evaluations from last winter recently, a few of the lesbian students mentioned that they thought we should read more works by women than we did that term. I usually include Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as an honorary lesbian text, but at least one student thought that wasn’t right: she argued that this novel was really about being transgendered, not about being a lesbian. That’s kind of debatable, but I take her point. Last year, we read Feinberg, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah, and a few poems by lesbian writers. (One of these poems, by the poet Chrystos, is one of my favorite poems ever: “I Suck” is the title. I highly recommend it. I also love Susan Griffin’s “In Response to a Man’s Question ….”) We also read a chapter from Song of the Loon, a chapter from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. So, the number of texts by women and by men were roughly the same, but the amount of class time spent on “lesbian texts” and “gay male texts” favored the men a little.

Ultimately, there are three problems that make this favoring difficult to address. First, OU is on 10-week quarters. This means that we simply don’t have time to read as much as I would like. So, I tend to change the reading list from year to year to address the changing demographics and tastes of my students. Of course this means that I’m always a year behind: this year’s class will address last year’s suggestions for improvement. Second, I know less about lesbian writers and texts than I do gay male authors and their works, and the lesbian texts I do know about don’t always stand up in quality and importance to the male-authored ones. I recognize my own bias in making that assertion — to some degree, I’m sure that I think some of the male texts are better and more important than some of the female-authored texts because I’m a gay male, but it’s not just that inherent bias. As much as I like Rubyfruit Jungle (a novel that I teach from time to time), it’s simply not in the same league as Angels in America or Stone Butch Blues. And finally, I am the only member of my department that teaches this course. If someone else taught the course, students would undoubtedly get a different take on Lesbian and Gay Lit, one that might include more (or at least different) knowledge and discussion of lesbian works.

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Reading Samuel Pepys Friday, Dec 15 2006 

books and research and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 12:09 pm

I’ve long enjoyed reading around in the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a late seventeenth-century English bureaucrat who worked in the Naval Office. The level of minute detail that Pepys included in his diary — on just about every imaginable facet of life: entertainment, his sex life, his relationship with his wife, his duties in the Naval Office, his thoughts about the monarch, government, and administration, what he ate, what he drank, how he traveled from one place to another, the coronation of Charles II, the Great Fire of 1666, and much, much more — make it an important source of information for historians and literary scholars alike.

Samuel PepysIn the past, I’ve looked up specific entries in the diary, Pepys’s thoughts on the libertines I write about: Sir Charles Sedley, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, for example. I haven’t ever just started at the beginning and simply read the diary. Until now (sort of).

I’ve decided to teach the Diary in my eighteenth-century class this spring. Since it’s actually a 9 volume set (in print, plus a companion volume and an index), I obviously can’t teach the whole thing. Instead, I’ll order an edition of selections from the Diary, probably the Modern Library edition, which presents the selections in order rather than topically, like the California edition, A Pepys Anthology.

Since I’ve never taught more than one or two entries from the Diary, I thought that I should read through the edition I’m going to order and begin to think about what kinds of directions I want to give my students to guide them in their reading. So, I started reading in January 1660 and am working my way through to the end, 1669. I can’t predict what my students will make of it, but I think it’s a fascinating read. I’m already learning so much. For instance, I didn’t know that Pepys actually sailed over to the Netherlands as part of the official party that brought the royal family back to England in 1660. I’ve also become increasingly impressed with just how much Pepys bustles around London. (If I didn’t have anything else to do, I would love to join the ranks of scholars working on “London Studies,” but since I am busy elsewhere, maybe I can just teach a class sometime on London.)

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Staging Governance Friday, Dec 8 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 5:12 pm

I recently finished reading Daniel O’Quinn’s Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, the last of the three books I’m reviewing for a journal. In sum, it’s an interesting book that definitely adds to our current understanding of the effects of colonialism on London society in the late eighteenth century. As with the other two books, however, I’ll save the usual review stuff for that essay.

What I’d like to write about here is how reading this book has helped me think a bit about my approach to teaching. As I read the introduction to O’Quinn’s book, I was struck by a phrase he uses in the following sentence:

Charting and adjudicating the limits of social interaction, the theatre, perhaps more than any other form of cultural production, offers a glimpse of how change swept through a culture in the midst of fundamental social transformation both at home and abroad. (12)

First, I want to say that I totally agree with the general sentiment of first part of this statement: due to its reconstruction of social life for the stage, the theater is indeed uniquely able to comment on socio-political change and transformation in any historical period. The whole point of the theater is, in a way, to offer such mapping and judgment. Martin Esslin’s An Anatomy of Drama makes this argument succinctly and convincingly. (I teach Esslin’s book from time to time — it’s profound and accessible at the same time, if that’s possible.)

But I am also struck by the fact that “charting and adjudicating the limit of social interaction” is what literature more generally does in a given culture. Here’s how I would rephrase O’Quinn’s construction:

artistic texts (literary and non-literary, canonical and non-canonical, written and visual) chart and adjudicate the contours of cultural and political debate.

In many ways this is a great summary phrase for how new historicist and cultural studies scholars view literary texts. So, due to my training in those perspectives, I’ve long thought about texts in this way, but reading O’Quinn’s book has crystallized these particular words — chart and adjudicate — for me, helping me focus my preexisting ideas and think about them more productively.

Literary texts chart contemporary debates by delineating the sides of a particular debate and showing us where the points of agreement and disagreement lie. They also show us the limits of debate — what can be imagined and what cannot; what can be published and what cannot; what can be written and what cannot; etc.

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Hard: A Review Tuesday, Dec 5 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 10:41 pm

New York City was the perfect (and somewhat obvious) place to read Wayne Hoffman’s new novel, Hard, which is about the crackdown on gay sex in various venues in NYC in the late 1990s. I finished reading the novel over the weekend. It’s a great read that raises lots of interesting questions about gay liberation and sexual politics without forgetting to entertain its readers.

Hard by Wayne HoffmanThe novel centers on Moe Pearlman, who is known for giving the best blow jobs in the city. He practices his skills in this activity every chance he gets: at sex parties, in the backrooms of bars, in adult theaters, and at home with the various men he’s met online. Moe is also a graduate student and a would-be journalist. In part, the novel focuses on the love lives of Moe and his two best friends, Gene and Aaron. Moe has long been attracted to a man he sees in a diner window. Gene, Moe’s ex-lover who also happens to be HIV+, moves to New York at the beginning of the novel; the closeness of their friendship causes friction in Gene’s new relationship with Dustin, who can’t seem to get over his jealousy of Moe. And Aaron discovers that his new love interest is moonlighting as a prostitute.

The novel is also about Moe’s antipathy for Frank DeSoto, a gay activist who is behind the mayor’s crusade to close down the gay sex venues. Frank believes that gay men must stop indulging in promiscuous sex due to the AIDS crisis; he therefore aligns himself with more conservative, anti-gay forces to try to force gay men into celibacy. If Hard has a villain, it’s Frank DeSoto.

But one of the best parts of Hoffman’s novel is that, while the novel clearly opposes Frank’s ideology and methods, it avoids simply demonizing him. Over the course of the book, we see why Frank has adopted his current views. We also see his faults and hypocrisies. I like that Moe is not simply right and Frank is not merely wrong. Indeed, Hoffman draws each of his characters as fully developed (albeit fictionalized) people. They have realistic problems, to which they generally find realistic answers, if they find answers at all.

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The Last Time I Saw You: A Review Friday, Nov 24 2006 

books thisgaudygildedstage 3:45 pm

I wanted to break through all of that. I wanted to tell and hear and you wanted to tell me too and so you did. I was the only one who heard, the only one you told and though you tried to forget I didn’t. I can’t. I won’t for both. A secret is a thing that we hold dear. This secret is the thing that holds us, dearie, still.

So says the narrator in “Aspects of the Novel,” one of the internal monologues cum short stories in Rebecca Brown’s new collection, The Last Time I Saw You, published by City Lights. Brown’s narrative voices hold on to the secrets of their pasts, holding onto their memories long after relationships have disintegrated, even when the accuracy or even truthfullness of those memories is questionable at best. The Last Time I Saw You is an innovative and captivating read. I highly recommend it.

Last Time I Saw You

I bought the book in Philadelphia earlier this month. I’ve been looking for a recent lesbian-authored text to teach in my next Lesbian and Gay Lit course. I have to admit that, although I had seen Rebecca Brown’s name before, I hadn’t read any of her works. The Last Time I Saw You is Brown’s 11th book. From what I’ve read online, The Gifts of the Body, a 1995 novels about a home-care worker who assists people with AIDS, is her most famous work to date. Reading The Last Time definitely makes me want to check out her previous work.

In each of the 12 stories, we observe the narrative voice’s viewpoint, often involving lost love. All of the stories are great, but a few stand out to me. The first one, “The Trenches,” is an engaging monologue about the innocence, if that’s even the right word, of childhood and its loss as one grows up. Indeed, the question of whether “innocence” is even the right way to describe the narrator’s childhood is the kind of questioning that Brown revels in throughout this collection. For her, identity, memory, and even love are unstable qualities, intangibles that can only be grasped at and never fully held or possessed.

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What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up? Tuesday, Nov 21 2006 

academia and books and queer culture and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:05 pm

Recently, I started reading Wayne Hoffman’s novel, Hard. Since I haven’t finished it yet, I don’t want to review it or even write too much about it now. But it’s raised a couple of issues for me that I thought I’d record and reflect on here.

The novel is (partly) about Moe Pearlman, a New Yorker who is on a crusade to preserve his right/opportunity to engage in promiscuous sex in various venues as a conservative mayor (in league with another crusading gay man) works to shut down all of the bathhouses, sex clubs, and adult theaters where Moe indulges his desires. So, in sum, it’s a book about the ethics of gay sexual freedom in an age where AIDS still exists but in which its power to frighten gay men and restrict their sexual activities seems to have waned.

My first thought about the book is how it obviously responds to Larry Kramer’s Faggots, a 1978 novel that criticizes 1970s gay male promiscuity. Even a cursory search demonstrates that Kramer has a vexed reputation in the gay community. He is often dimissed as simply anti-sex. In reviewing Hard, Christopher Bram explicitly compares these two novels and repeats the usual criticism of Kramer and his novel. I have to admit that I love Faggots and now teach it annually in my GLBT Lit course. It’s definitely not a simple novel, nor is it simply anti-sex, in my opinion.

Thinking about the relationship between these two novels made me think about teaching Hoffman’s novel as a response to Kramer’s. I think these two books would work well together, with Angels in America spliced in between. Teaching these three works together would raise interesting issues about sexual freedom, responsibility, relationships, and AIDS, just to name a few. The biggest drawback might be that each of these works is a little long, so it might become difficult to schedule them without taking time away from the lesbian authors I’d also want to teach in the class. (But that’s not an issue I have to think about now.)

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Darkly Dreaming Dexter: A Review Sunday, Nov 19 2006 

books thisgaudygildedstage 11:11 pm

I’m still reading the final book for the review essay I’m writing, but that hasn’t stopped me from reading books for fun too. This past week I read Jeff Lindsay’s 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter. I first became interested in the book because of the new Showtime series. Even though the series is really good, I can’t watch it — it gives me bad dreams. But I can totally read about the subject matter without much ill effect.

The novel is about Dexter, a lab technician for the Miami police department, who also happens to be a serial killer. He’s a “good” serial killer: he’s good at it and he only kills people who commit murder and get away with it, usually other serial killers.

I love that this novel (and the series) turns the typical detective novel on its head. The detective is not a police officer or a little old lady who enjoys gossip or a fussy Belgian; he’s a killer who’s been trained by his foster father to channel his dark energy for good. (I should say that I love these sorts of novels; it’s kind of like my fascination with watching documentaries about snakes: I hate snakes, I know I’m going to have nightmares after watching a snake documentary, but if I see one on tv I can’t help but become entralled by the horror. That’s what reading really bloody contemporary crime fiction is like for me!)

Over the course of the novel, Dexter meets his match, the ice truck killer who kills and dismembers prostitutes and leaves a special calling card: he drains their bodies of blood before dismembering them. Seeing him as an artist, Dexter is torn about whether he should pursue this killer and stop him or join him. Overall, this novel is fast-paced, the characters are drawn well, and it’s suspenseful and engrossing; I could hardly put it down. I really liked it.

Since it is now a series, I do want to compare the two just enough to say that the series, which is based on the book, is not an exact adaptation. That would have been little more than a made for tv movie. Here are the opening credits for the series; I think they’re brilliant. They make breakfast seem so disgusting!

The series adds characters and subplots while subtracting other elements, most notably a real sense of Dexter’s love of killing and mental instability. In the novel, he suspensefully totters on the edge of the rules his foster father made for him; on tv, he’s a likeable good guy who lives by a fairly clear creed. I like the series and wish I could watch it without any side effects, but I think they lose something by making Dexter, played wonderfully by Michael C. Hall, so likeable.

The book is both more suspenseful and more straightforward than the series. It’s not quite as good as Patricia Cornwell‘s first couple of Kay Scarpetta novels, but it’s definitely a good read, if you’re into that sort of thing.

 

Performing Blackness on English Stages Monday, Nov 6 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:42 pm

I just finished reading Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, another work on the list of books I’m reviewing. This book examines instances of blackface on the English stage from the late Medieval period through the eighteenth century. Overall, it’s a good book. I especially like its early description of how early modern actors (and eventually actresses) ‘blackened’ themselves by using makeup composed of burnt cork or coal or by wearing a mask on stage.

Since I am reviewing it formally in my review essay to be published next year (presumably), I will again leave the details of a formal review to that essay. Instead, I’d like to reflect briefly on how this book has gotten me thinking about my next graduate course. I’d like to teach a course specifically on Restoration literature, focusing exclusively on 1660 to 1688. I’d also like for about half of readings for this course to be comprised of plays, since the Restoration is mostly known for its drama.

Reading Performing Blackness on English Stages reminds me a bit of Cynthia Lowenthal’s Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, an excellent book published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2003. I’m struck by how I’d like to incorporate more of the issues raised by these studies in my class. Of particular interest to me at the moment is race and how the theater could allow Restoration society to try out its constructions of race and see if they worked. I’m also interested in doing more with religion, depictions of Islam in particular.

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Gentility and the Comic Theatre Wednesday, Nov 1 2006 

books thisgaudygildedstage 6:15 pm

I’ve just finished reading Mark Dawson’s Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005), an excellent study of how gentility was staged in comic drama between 1660 and 1725, with particular emphasis on the post-1688 years.

I’m reviewing this book for a journal, so I’ll leave all the normal review stuff for that. But I thought that this would be a good space in which to reflect a little on how Dawson’s book has spurred me to think about a couple of professional issues.

To be honest, I’ve always been a little bored by English drama between 1688 and 1725. My own research has focused on the period between 1660 and 1685, the best 25-year-period in English literature, imo, and I have a fondness for many of the plays written in the late eighteenth century, works like She Stoops to Conquer and A School for Scandal. (I once saw a great production of the former at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT. It was hilarious and very well produced.) But the period in between has held little interest for me, with the exception of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, which is a masterpiece. About a year-and-a-half ago, I taught Susan Centlivre’s 1718 comedy A Bold Stroke for a Wife in both my undergraduate and graduate courses, but it left me thinking that sometimes there’s a reason why some literary works are forgotten or neglected by history.

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