Passion Works Studio Sunday, Oct 21 2007 

art thisgaudygildedstage 11:37 am

Yesterday, PJ and I visited the Passion Works Studio for the first time. He’s long wanted to stop by, learn more about the studio, and maybe buy something. They were having an art sale, so we decided to go.

passion flower Passion Works is a local studio that supports artistic collaboration between artists with and without developmental disabilities. They are best known for their passion flowers, pictured here. In fact, the Passion Flower is the official flower of Athens. It’s kind of amazing to see all of the passion flowers lined up throughout the studio. Not only is each flower unique, but there are different genres of passion flowers: painted ones, rust ones, and stainless steel ones, as well as large and small. We intended to buy one, but I was a little overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing one, so we ended up delaying that choice until a future visit.

Since this was a special sale, the studio was a) full of people and b) full of art. The art sale was distributed throughout the building, which was a great way to expose people like us to the full range of the studio’s activities and space. I liked that we were forced (in a good way) to move beyond the usual gift shop and into the other work spaces and conference rooms in order to see the various kinds of art that were on sale.

The NacklaceWhile we didn’t buy a flower, we did buy a painting, “The Necklace” (2003), by Carolyn Williams and Visiting Artist Mark Hackworth. This isn’t a great picture of the painting — we spent some time this morning trying to get a good picture, and this is the best of the bunch. I had to take it from a slightly side angle in order to avoid getting my own reflection in the glass. I also had to use a flash. But you can get the general idea of what it looks like.

The image is of overlapping yellow, green, and red rectangles which, by overlapping, create a purple rectangle. The green circles and lines have been exposed from underneath the purple area. There are also black lines and circles overlaying the purple patch, but they’re not as visible in this photo.

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Teaching Tom Jones Friday, Oct 19 2007 

books and movies and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 9:19 am

This week I finished teaching Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which I had never taught before. In fact, I’d never finished reading it before, which is one of the reasons I decided to teach it this term — what better way to force myself to read it!?

Because the novel is so long, some 800 pages, we spent three weeks (fully a third of our class) on it. Now that I’ve finished it, I have to say I see why this book is reputed to be one of the great novels of English literature. It’s a hoot! Parts of his are hilariously funny, and (maybe because it is so long) it encapsulates just about every major issue that a teacher would want to bring up about mid-eighteenth-century literature and culture. I also think a good number of my students enjoyed reading it. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who clearly read all (or most of it) seemed to enjoy it and have interesting things to say about it.

Tom Jones DVDWhen I decided to teach it, I also decided to show my class a miniseries version of the novel as we read. The dvd is distributed by A&E and was originally a BBC production. This production stars Max Beesley as Tom and Samantha Morton as Sophia. They both do an excellent job in the roles. Beesley is very good at playing the manslut with the heart of gold, and Morton is great as the ever put-upon Sophia (but she’s always great in everything she does!).

One of my students commented on the production’s costumes when we finished it on Wednesday; she really liked them. I totally agreed. This miniseries gives its audience a great feel for eighteenth-century clothing, manners, houses, etc.

To finish my mini-review, everything about this production is top-notch. I also really liked James D’Arcy as Blifil, Lindsay Duncan as Lady Bellaston, and Brian Blessed as Squire Western. All of the casting was perfect, but these three actors were especially great in their roles. So, I’m glad we watched it.

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Remembering John Denver Sunday, Oct 14 2007 

music thisgaudygildedstage 8:43 pm

As a kid, one of my favorite singers was John Denver. I was too young to think of him in these terms, but I’m sure he was one of my first crushes. This past Friday was the tenth anniversary of his death. He died in a plane crash on October 12, 1997. He was only 53 years old.

I heard “Annie’s Song” playing in Kroger yesterday, and it reminded me of how much I had loved him as a kid. I’ve been intending to get a copy of his greatest hits or something, and hearing him yesterday finally gave me the impetus to do so. So, I’ve been listening to his music while I’ve been working on an article (on something entirely unrelated).

What strikes me about him now, not having listened to his music for such a long time, is just how pure his voice sounds. I’m also impressed by how sincere his lyrics come across as he sings them. He reminds me of Kate Wolf, another great folk singer. Denver acted in movies, like Oh God, and appeared on numerous television shows, mostly notably The Muppets. But it’s his music that endures.

“Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Rocky Mountain High,” “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and “Sunshine on My Shoulder” are all so iconic. Listening to them now definitely makes me nostalgic for the 1970s. I love his hair in some of these old videos!

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National Coming Out Day Thursday, Oct 11 2007 

queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 7:58 pm

Today is National Coming Out Day, a day in which closeted gays and lesbians are encouraged to come out and in which lesbians and gays who are already out celebrate our visibility and self-actualization. It’s also a day to reflect on the fact that coming out is a constantly repeated activity for us gays and lesbians — we come out in all kinds of ways on a daily basis.

I was 23 when I started to came out to my friends and family. Here’s a picture of me that was taken at the same time that I was coming out:

Me at 23

Before I get to the coming out part, let’s stop and say a couple of things about this picture. First, I can’t believe I was so skinny — no wonder everyone thought I was still in high school! At the time, looking like I was 15 was really irritating; I was in my second year of graduate school when this was taken. Second, this picture makes me realize that, while I’m no longer a skinny little twink, I haven’t really lost that much hair since then (yippee!). Apparently, I’ve always had a receded hairline and “baby fine hair,” as my hairstylist calls it. This realization feels me with relief!

Back to the gay part. The guy in this picture was, as we’ve already partly established, a graduate student at Texas A&M University who was earning a Master’s Degree in English literature. He had just bought his first car, a cherry red 1993 Hyundai Excel. He was taking two seminars: one on Milton and one on non-dramatic Renaissance literature. He probably would have described himself as a devout Christian; he definitely attended church weekly.

And he was in the throes of his first serious crush on another man, another graduate student, Sam, a queer Ph.D. student in the English Department. I had had a class with Sam the previous Spring Quarter. The class was boring as hell, so I entertained myself by surreptitiously starring at Sam, who would beautifully (and somewhat dramatically) remove his glasses during class and gesture with them as he talked. But I’m pretty sure I never talked to him that term. I definitely wasn’t ready to come out then.

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Planning a Gay Lit Syllabus Monday, Oct 8 2007 

teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:20 pm

My favorite time of the quarter is finally here: the time to start planning next quarter’s classes! (And I’m only half joking about that!)

As usual, I’m teaching my Lesbian & Gay Literature class during the winter quarter. Every time I teach it, I try to include some new works that I’ve not taught before. I also try to keep a few books I’m familiar with so that everything isn’t starting from scratch. So, deciding what to keep from last time and what to add is the main difficulty. The basic course description is always the same:

This course studies the political, artistic, and rhetorical uses of the erotic/sexual in gay and lesbian literature with particular emphasis on the ways in which gay and lesbian identities and experiences have been represented in post-Stonewall (i.e., post-1969) literary discourse. Regardless of how homosexuals self-identify, the heterosexual mainstream by and large defines us according to its perception of lesbian and gay sexual identities, desires, and activities. Queer writers have therefore struggled with the issue of representing sexual identity, desire, and practice in their literary works. Should representations of sex work to make homosexual identities, desires, and practices aesthetically pleasing in an effort to gain acceptance in heterosexual society? Or should queer writers revel in what makes us different, using explicit descriptions of sex as a literary corollary to the phrase, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”? We will try to answer these and other related questions as we read this term.

In a way, insisting that the class focus on post-Stonewall literature makes it even more difficult sometimes. There are a lot of great texts from before 1969, but I am ultimately committed to teaching a class centered of gay and lesbian identity and that arguably means post-Stonewall. I once tried teaching the class as a survey of “queer” texts since Shakespeare, but neither I nor my students enjoyed that kind of broad sweep in a 10-week class.

So, I tend to select 5 or 6 authors/books for us to study (usually with some smaller texts thrown in). This past spring, for example, I taught Leslie Feinberg‘s Stone Butch Blues, Katherine Forrest‘s Curious Wine, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Wayne Hoffman’s Hard, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. (I threw in a little Richard Amory, Andrew Holleran, Chrystos, Dorothy Allison, and Jewelle Gomez.)

While that class went well, I’m ready to change it up a bit. In particular, I was unhappy with how little racial diversity I had among the writers we studied last quarter. I also want to give my students more generic diversity — non-fiction, fiction, drama, poetry, etc. I usually chose to keep a couple of texts that I’ve taught before and add a few news ones to the syllabus. So, I’ve been thinking about what to add and what to subtract.

I starting by thinking about which texts I absolutely wanted to keep. I quickly decided that there are two of them: Angels and Fun Home. Angels is one of the most important gay texts, and I really like to include its ultimately optimistic view of the next millennium. And Fun Home has become one of my favorite texts to teach. Everyone I’ve recommended it to has loved it. And my students really responded well to it last term.

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Two Days in Paris: A Review Thursday, Oct 4 2007 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 7:55 pm

Over the weekend, I saw Two Days in Paris, a film written, directed, and starring Julie Delpy. Here’s the trailer:

The movie is about Marion, played by Delpy, and Jack, played by Adam Goldberg, who spend two days in Paris on their way back home to New York after a vacation in Venice. Marion is French and grew up in Paris. She is therefore naturally looking forward to showing Jack the city and introducing him to her friends.

Jack, who is an interior designer by trade, is a rather difficult person even under the best of circumstances, but meeting Marion’s too familiar parents is just the beginning of his troubles in Paris. It turns out that Marion has remained friends with many of her exes, and every time she and Jack go anywhere they inevitably run into one of them. What first seems a funny coincidence quickly becomes the bane of Jack’s existence, especially when he starts to wonder just how friendly Marion remains with one ex in particular.

I thought this movie was delightful, but I have to admit that I’m a total sucker for Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, and movies set in Paris. So, this was cinematic feast for me. I laughed throughout he film — it’s hilarious: Marion’s mother walks in on them while they’re having sex, for example, and Marion seems to think nothing of it. Similarly, we learn early in the movie that Marion has given her family a copy of a picture of Jack nude with a balloon tied around his penis (Adam Goldberg is HOT, by the way, in this picture!) And I laughed until it hurt during a scene in which Marion’s cat, who has grown rather stout in the two weeks that Marion and Jack were in Italy, is the focus of a family argument. The cat steals the show simply by being passed around like a sack of potatoes. It’s hilarious!

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Hottie of the Month: Richard Cumberland Sunday, Sep 30 2007 

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 'hotties' thisgaudygildedstage 8:41 pm

Richard CumberlandSeptember’s hottie of the month is Richard Cumberland, an eighteenth-century dramatist. He was born in 1732 and died in 1811. Cumberland was one of the most productive and important playwrights of the late eighteenth-century. Best known for his sentimental comedy The West Indian, Cumberland also penned a number of other successful plays, including The Brothers (1769), The Fashionable Lover (1772), The Jew (1794), and The Wheel of Fortune (1795).

As the dates of these plays suggest, Cumberland’s career is often divided into two parts. After devoting the 1780s to writing relatively unsuccessful tragedies, musical theater, religious poetry, and novels, the successful production of The Jew began the later phase of his career. Indeed, this comedy brought international renown: it was produced throughout Europe and America, was revived in throughout the nineteenth century, and was even translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. The play was adapted in 2000 by New York playwright Robert Armin as Sheva, the Benevolent. I’m currently writing about The Jew, a play that I think is totally fascinating.

Scholars generally agree that Cumberland’s goal in writing The Jew was to bring greater tolerance of Jews to English society. He worked to do this by depicting the title character’s humanity in his play. In choosing the literary vogue of sentimentalism to achieve this goal, Cumberland departed from traditional representations of Jews as villainous usurers bent on the murderous destruction of Christians, an image made famous by Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and perpetuated in anti-Semitic treatises and a wide range of literary works throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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The Back Passage: A Review Thursday, Sep 27 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 12:54 pm

Book Cover James Lear’s The Back Passage is the gay adult version of the movie Gosford Park, or at least that’s what kept coming to my mind as I read it. I wish Ryan Phillippe, Jeremy Northam, and James Wilby would star in a film adaptation of this novel!

The Back Passage follows Edward “Mitch” Mitchell, a 1924 Cambridge postgraduate student who agrees to visit Drekeham Hall, a Norfolk country estate, with his best friend, Harry “Boy” Morgan, who is engaged to the daughter of Sir James Eagle, the patriarch of the Drekeham household. Mitch’s motivation in accompanying Boy is far from innocent, however, since he’s been lusting after his friend since he first saw Boy carrying an upturned rowboat out of a river. Since proper young women don’t put out before marriage — and Mitch certainly does — it’s not long before Mitch find himself in a cupboard giving Boy his first blow job.

Before can finish the liaison, however, Boy’s fiancée screams, revealing that a dead body has just fallen out of a cupboard similar to the one Mitch and Boy are currently using. Having read a lot of detective fiction in his youth, Mitch intuits that something fishing is going on when one of the servants with no apparent connection to the dead man is quickly precipitously arrested for the murder. He therefore decides that it’s up to him to find the real murderer and bring him to justice.

But he murder plot is really just an excuse to follow Mitch’s erotic adventures, as he seduces just about every man connected with or investigating the murder, including Sir James’s younger, effeminate, and obviously gay brother, a local constable, a reporter, a couple of the servants, Sir James’s secretary, and, of course, Boy. His investigation even gives him the opportunity to observe a couple of the servants indulge their own same-sex desires and threatens his own life when he becomes the object of a corrupt policeman’s potentially homicidal S/M fantasies. The Back Passage is a fun, entertaining take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

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Teaching with Commonplace Books Monday, Sep 24 2007 

teaching thisgaudygildedstage 7:50 pm

This quarter I’m requiring the students in my eighteenth-century literature class to maintain a commonplace book. A commonplace book is a book into which you copy passages from your reading that you would like to keep on hand for reference, passages that are striking for their insight, their style, their beauty, their humor, or their embodiment of something significant.

Our system of commonplacing is based on a 1799 “improvement” to John Locke‘s method for indexing a commonplace book. As this 1799 text reads,

The man who reads, and neglects to note down the essence of what he has read; the man or woman who sees, and omits to record what he has seen; the man who thinks, and fails to treasure up his thoughts in some place, where may readily find them for use at any future period; will often have occasion to regret an omission, which such a book, as is now offered to him, is calculated to remedy.

John Locke’s “new method of making common-place books” sought “to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval,” by creating a system of indexing the book’s quotations. He proposed that each topic to be included in the commonplace book be represented by a keyword that is then reduced to a two-letter code. These two letters were the first letter of the word followed by the first vowel. The word, “Passion,” for example, would be represented by the code “Pa;” the word, “Order,” would be represented by the code “Oe;” and the word, “Art,” would be represented by the code “Aa,” since it has only one vowel. Entries in the commonplace book would be indexed according to these codes.

Whenever he found a passage that he wanted to include in his notebook, Locke would assign it a keyword (and thus a code). He would write the keyword at the top of a page. He would then reserve that page for entries on that topic. When he had a passage with a different key word that he wanted to record, he would go to the next free page, write the word at the top, and then transcribe the passage.

If Locke wanted to write down the following quotation from Richard Hooker:

Happiness is that estate whereby we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full possession of that which simply for itself is to be desired, and containeth in it after an eminent sort of the contentation of our desires, the highest degree of all our perfection.

He would open his commonplace book to the first clear page (assuming he hadn’t already started a section on “happiness”). Imagining that the first available page was page 16, for example, Locke would write “Happiness” at the top of the page and transcribe the quotation. Next, he would turn to the index, find the section of the index grid for “Ha,” and record the number 16 there.

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What I’m Listening to: Amy Winehouse Wednesday, Sep 19 2007 

music thisgaudygildedstage 1:44 pm

I finally downloaded Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Of course her singles and very public personal problems with drugs and bulimia have been all over the place for the past six months or so. I wasn’t too keen on “Rehab” when I first heard it, but I loved “You Know I’m No Good.” So, I checked out some of her other tracks on Youtube and decided that I liked her sound enough to buy the whole album. Here’s “You Know I’m No Good:”

Since buying the album, I’ve fallen in love with two additional tracks, “Love Is a Losing Game” and “Tears Dry on Their Own.” While she has a basic retro sound in all of her music, these tracks show how diverse that sound can actually be. “Love is a Losing Game” is a quiet, simple song that uses that quietness and simplicity to express such pathos about love, while “Tears Dry on Their Own” is almost an anthem of the self-sufficient woman who can get over failed love and start anew. Its up-tempo chorus is really catchy and triumphant.

Here’s “Tears:”

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