Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently

Bannon, Ann. The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995.


I found this used at Better World Books in Goshen, Indiana. It includes four of Bannon's Beebo Brinker novels: Odd Girl Out (1957), I Am A Woman (1959), Women in the Shadows (1959), and Beebo Brinker (1962). I've read Beebo Brinker before and really enjoyed it because it gives a non-condemning view of lesbianism and is thus an essential early text in LGBT literature. I am a total sucker for omnibus volumes like this one, and it was only $5.98, so I had to buy it even though I am trying not to buy more books before I move at the end of July.


Foer, Jonathan Safran. Tree of Codes. 2nd ed. London: Visual Editions, 2011.


I am so excited to finally get this book! I ordered it in January when I first heard about it, and amazon claimed to have it in stock, but didn't because the first printing (called the first edition by the publisher, and the copy I have is labelled the "second edition" on the copyright page, but as far as I know it is the same text as the first; that is, it should be labelled the "second printing," not "edition") had already sold out. Copies of it were selling for hundreds of dollars. Once the second printing came out amazon fulfilled my order at their original price, $26, which is a great deal since the cover price is $40. I love Foer's work, and I love postmodern fiction, including his, so I am super-excited to see what he does with Tree of Codes, which has cut-outs on every page so that the words from other pages become part of the story of the page one is reading at the moment. It is as much an art object as it is a novel.

Roth's The Humbling

I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Humbling. Generally I have enjoyed his recent fiction (especially Exit Ghost) and been impressed with the continuing high quality of his work in his 70s, but even so I was surprised with how good The Humbling is both in terms of aesthetic quality and plot (i.e., the enjoyable quality of the story--it's a good yarn). The protagonist Simon's story ends up being the traditional Roth plot of a megalomaniacal man who is incapable of seeing other peoples' actions as anything other than slights against him (though this time he's not a self-hating Jew), but with the twist (for Roth) thrown in that the woman he desires and seduces is a lesbian.


This is where the book becomes problematic. Virtually all of Roth's protagonists are horribly misogynist, but their idiocy is clear to readers: their anti-women feelings are so intense that the characters become caricatures (as Roth intends) and we know to disagree with them. However, The Humbling's treatment of lesbianism (not to mention its flat, stereotypical, oppressive treatment of transgendered persons) is much more muddied. Simon's love interest, Pegeen, has just been jilted by her lover and now views lesbianism as a "seventeen-year mistake" (61). So of course she follows the stereotypical questioning lesbian narrative of "let's find a penis to help me through my problems; being heteronormative is obviously what I need to help me through my life issues." (This narrative is also evident most recently in Julianne Moore's character from the film The Kids Are All Right.) When she and Simon first have sex, she tells him that his penis "fills you up [...] the way dildos and fingers don't" (92). At this point the dialogue resembles badly written pornography for straight men.


Pegeen leaves Simon at the end of the book, which would seem to reject her previous rejection of lesbianism, but we are not told what happens to her once she leaves. She might go back to women or she might not. Roth has, of course, made a career of writing troubling texts that readers are nevertheless unable to put down, and The Humbling is no different in this regard. But this is the first time that I have been unable to simply laugh it off afterward, and I am still trying to figure out how I feel about that.

Books Acquired Recently (continued)

As I was writing the previous post this morning, the mailman (gendered term used intentionally because it actually was a man today) delivered three more book packages that I didn't have time to open until this evening:


Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Westport: Greenwood, 1987.


I used this book a lot during my dissertation and decided to buy my own copy because Fox is one of the few critics to examine Delany's The Tides of Lust in-depth, which is one of the novels that I will study in my next book.


Sallis, James, ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.


Another book that was helpful for the Delany chapter of my dissertation and will also come in handy for my next project.


Weedman, Jane Branham. Samuel R. Delany. Mercer Island: Starmont, 1982.


Rounding out my collection of Delany criticism.

Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently:


I've gone a little crazy buying books in the past few weeks. Not all of them have even arrived yet! These are the ones I've received so far.


Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed. Elizabeth Alexander. New York: Library of America, 2005.


I would love to teach Brooks extensively sometime rather than just a few poems from an anthology, but her Selected Poems does not include any of her work from the Black Arts Movement, which is what I am most interested in, so I ordered this collection to see if it would be suitable to use instead because it covers her entire career.


Germano, William. From Dissertation to Book. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.


My big writing project this summer is to revise my dissertation into book form so that I can begin submitting book proposals to publishers. I read Germano's book last night and it was quite helpful in giving me a map for going about my revisions.


Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.


Amazon recommended this to me, and it looks interesting. African American literature and LGBT studies are my two scholarly foci these days, so this should be a helpful resource.


Koch, Kenneth. Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems. Ed. Ron Padgett. New York: Library of America, 2007.


I've been meaning to read Koch for years because of his close friendship with my favorite poet, Frank O'Hara. There have been numerous times in the past few years when I've almost bought this collection, but then didn't. Labyrinth Books had it on sale for $6.00 new, so I decided now was the time.


McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Ungar, 1984.


My next book project is on Delany, so last week I ordered copies of all of the books on him that I didn't already own. Delany says in About Writing that McEvoy's book is the worst one about his work, so I won't use it much (if at all), but I like to be throrough. There is little enough criticism on Delany that one can't be choosy.


Moore, Honor, ed. Poems From the Women's Movement. New York: Library of America, 2009.


This looked really interesting when I saw it in the Labyrinth Books catalogue, and it was only $6.00. It might be fun to teach in a Rhetoric course. I am a total sucker for Library of America books because they are so aesthetically pleasing.


Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.


Amazon recommended this to me after I ordered Johnson and Henderson's anthology. I am very much interested in the literature of terrorism and more broadly the continuing after-effects of 9/11, so Puar's book sounds very interesting to me, though I probably won't have time to read it for a while.


Stine, Jean Marie. Season of the Witch. 1968. San Francisco: Eros, 2011.


I read about Stine's book in Thomas Disch's The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of, and it sounded interesting. I am constantly looking for examples of transgender fiction, and they are few and far between, so Stine helps fill the gap.

Starboard Wine and Samuel R. Delany's Canonicity

I've spent the last hour or so online looking to buy a copy of Samuel R. Delany's Starboard Wine (1984). It is the only volume of his nonfiction that I do not own. My search has thus far been unsuccessful, as it was when I undertook it at the end of December. I am so used to finding whatever book I want on amazon.com (and almost always for reasonable prices) that it is a disconcerting feeling when this process fails. I had seen a copy in fair condition for around $55.00 on amazon last summer and decided not to get it then because I didn't need it for my research at the time and thought I would wait until I had some extra money around, but now I am kicking myself for passing up the chance.


I did find that apparently Wesleyan University Press, which has published/re-printed most of Delany's nonfiction and several of his novels, was planning on issuing a new edition back in 1997, but it never came to fruition. It scares me that Delany has such a difficult time keeping his work in print (and had a tough time finding a publisher for his new novel, which is finally coming out in October after its original publisher, Alyson Books, went bankrupt earlier this year) because he is a tremendously important author, not only for the queer and African American communities, but for America in general. I focus on him in my criticism in order to keep him on the canonical radar, where he is already on the margins at best. He is too important to let fade into obscurity after his death (he turns 70 next year, so who knows how much time he has left?).

Thoughts on Cavafy

This evening I've been reading in The Complete Poems of [Constantine] Cavafy (the 1976 Rae Dalven translation) in between innings of the Mets-Nationals game. I first encountered his poetry in J.D. McClatchy's anthology Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems and enjoyed it enough to desire more.


Cavafy's poems are almost all either love poems (the majority of them clearly homoerotic) or retellings of ancient Greek myths or history. The latter are not very good (compared, for instance, with the skillful way in which H.D. writes about the same subject matter), but the love poems are excellent. They tend to be short vignettes, beautifully crafted, about brief liaisons and the former lovers of the speaker's youth.


"On Painting" especially stands out to me:


I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark. It continues to blow and rain.
I would sooner see than speak.
In this painting now, I am looking at
a beautiful lad who is stretched out
near the fountain, probably worn out from running.
What a beautiful child; what a divine noon
has now overtaken him to lull him to sleep.--
I sit and look so for a long time.
And again it is in art that I rest from its toil.


That last line is spectacular: the idea that the turmoil caused by the struggle to create beauty ("the languor of composition disheartens me") can only be assuaged by beauty's calming influence.


I love the depiction of visual art in poetry. Cavafy describes the path to the sublime that the best paintings reveal to viewers in a way that is reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which also speaks of the mysterious beauty of painting from a sideways angle, using a painting as an illustration of this beauty rather than attempting a straightforward description of its essence.

Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently (in the order I acquired them):


Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. 1998. New York: Touchstone, 2000.


A friend who knows that in the past several years I've been beginning to explore the world of science fiction (mostly as a result of reading Samuel R. Delany) gave this to me. It looks pretty interesting, though I have a rather sizeable stack of other things to read first, including the rest of the books mentioned in this post. I've read Disch's Camp Concentration and generally liked it as an anti-war statement/indictment of the American police state, though it wasn't spectacular aesthetically.


Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. 2nd ed. 1975. New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2009.


I first read this during my senior year of college, and it changed my life. The model of non-monogamous, anonymous sex it documents was completely new to me at the time, and it helped to open my eyes to just how important-while-being-commonplace sex is. It also helped me in my long journey to acknowledge that my sexual attraction to men is legitimate. Furthermore, the book prepared a conceptual framework which gave me a base from which to encounter and appreciate writers such as Delany and John Rechy, who have become essential for me.


Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton. 1976. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1996.


I'm re-reading this for a paper that I am working on, so I decided to get the edition that is currently in print rather than using my old Bantam edition. I am also thinking about teaching it next year. Usually when I teach Delany's science fiction I teach Babel-17, but I am getting a little tired of it. My problem is that the Delany novels I love the most and/or find the most interesting (e.g., in no particular order, The Mad Man, Dhalgren, Equinox, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals) are generally either too explicit or too complicated/long (or all three) to teach to undergraduates. Trouble on Triton might be an acceptable compromise.


Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004.


This is also for the paper I am writing. I read pieces of it while researching my dissertation, but am now ready to interact with it fully.

Tim Dlugos Lives!

I just found out today that Tim Dlugos's Collected Poems is coming out next month, edited by David Trinidad. Dlugos died of AIDS in 1990 just as he was becoming established as a significant poetic voice not only in the gay literary community, but in the wider poetry community as well. Since then he's been virtually ignored by anthologists and critics with the exception of a few short articles by Trinidad.


I was introduced to Dlugos's work when a professor of mine suggested I do a paper on him about five years ago (I have been remiss in failing to either revise it for publication or at least present it at a conference, but will have to revisit it once the new book is released). I love his poems because they have a vitality to them that is Frank O'Hara-esque. O'Hara is my favorite poet; thus that is one of the highest compliments I can pay another writer.


For instance, here is "Not Stravinsky" in full:


Dark-eyed boy in tight designer jeans and sneakers on your way from basketball practice at Bishop Somebody High, I


don't know what you're playing on your Walkman but it probably is not Stravinsky. (Powerless 46)


I love the Whitman-esque long lines (the poem is only two lines long even though each line is long enough to take up two lines of print) and subject matter. The same-sex desire expressed in the poem is beautiful, a fleeting moment of both enjoyment and sadness (the desire going completely unrequited) for the speaker (presumably Dlugos), the knowledge that all the two will ever share is a fleeting moment in passing that isn't even recognized by the boy, but is striking enough for Dlugos to commemorate in a poem. We see here the immediacy of O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, that urgency to get an experience down on paper before one moves on with the day, with the rest of life. Dlugos's "On This Train Are People Who Resemble" is also in this vein, an everyday list poem colored by the New York City vibe and references to pop culture. In fact, one could pass it off as a lost O'Hara poem to readers unfamiliar with Dlugos's work.


Hopefully this new collection will put Dlugos back on readers' radar because his work is too good to disappear outside the boundaries of the canon, which, for all its problematic characteristics, is useful for keeping essential literature in print. The best-case scenario would be for Dlugos's Collected Poems to do for his critical reputation what O'Hara's did for his when it was first published in 1971 (O'Hara was more well-known then than Dlugos is now among poetry lovers, but not yet among critics from the academy). Dlugos's Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990 (New York: High Risk Books, 1996, also edited by Trinidad), which is an excellent, concise collection, unfortunately did little to stir interest in his work.

Thoughts on Re-Reading

Later this afternoon I am going to begin re-reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for the first time since I bought it at the Strand (12th and Broadway in NYC) in summer 2003. I claim Rushdie as one of my favorite authors, but I haven't actually read any of his work since reading Midnight's Children in late 2005. Thus I am excited to get back to him.


I have done hardly any re-reading over the past seven years while I've been in graduate school (except in those instances where a book was assigned in several of my classes or I assigned a book to my classes multiple times [e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close], and also when studying for my Ph.D. exams) because I have not had the time. This is a practice that I miss, because I almost always find that I gain new insights into a text the second (or third, etc.) time around. I like the idea of having a set of texts that one returns to for sustenance throughout one's life as reminders for who one is and where one finds beauty in the world. Religious persons would use the term "sacred texts" to label what I am describing, and I like this term even though I am not religious and don't really care whether a "God" exists (actions are what is important, not whether some unprovable supernatural being is out there or not) because it signifies the idea that some texts help us experience the sublime, the beauty of the world (which are both important concepts for secular folks to claim) better than others.


Texts that have played this "sacred" role for me in the past and that I wish I had time now to re-read, but do not, include Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Di Brandt's poetry. Two authors that I have been able to re-read and continue to re-read as I have the time are Walt Whitman and Samuel R. Delany, both of whom I try to teach whenever possible. In Whitman's case, it's much easier to find time to re-read a poem or two (or a section of "Song of Myself" as the case may be) than a novel.


Part of what makes it so difficult to re-read is that I am always finding new books to read as well. I have at least a dozen new books on my shelf (mostly novels) waiting for me. Certainly my book-buying addiction does not lend itself to contemplative returns to old friends.


Also, sometimes I love parentheses a little too much.

Being Scholarly

Today has been an excellent, well-rounded day of scholarly activity. I taught the first quarter of my favorite book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in my Masterpieces of American Literature course, read some early Allen Ginsberg poems in preparation for a lecture on him that I am attending tomorrow, and wrote an abstract on the role of nudity in Samuel R. Delany’s work for a queer studies conference next October. Ginsberg and Delany are two of the inspirations for my beard (Walt Whitman is the third); it was a happy coincidence that they both played a role in my day. Writing the abstract was my favorite part of the day because it came so easily. It was one of those rare writing experiences where I can barely type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. This was in part because Delany is consistently very open about his body in his nonfiction and about his characters’ bodies in his fiction, so there is a lot of material to write about, but also because now that I have a job for next year I can focus on my scholarship again, which I have missed deeply. It feels good to get the creative juices flowing, to be reminded that I can still think in a scholarly way after not having done so since November, really.

Back in the Saddle Again

Today marks the return of the New Yorker in Exile blog. We'll see if lasts more than a few weeks this time! However, I am committed this go-round to posting every day no matter what, even if it is simply to post a message explaining why I haven't added any new content that day. I am beginning the blog again because I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "exile" in the past few days. I just accepted a job at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is somewhere that I never thought I would live. It turns out that SLC is a pretty cool place. It has beautiful architecture, amazing scenery (everywhere one turns there are mountains in the near distance that look so perfect one thinks they must be paintings rather than the real thing), and the largest per-capita rate of LGBT persons in the United States, so I will feel right at home. SLC is also intriguing to me conceptually because of its role as a refuge from exile for Mormon settlers. Having lived in the Mennonite equivalent of SLC, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as an insider, I am fascinated to see what it will be like to live in an end-destination for exiles as an outsider. One reason why the job at Westminster is appealing to me is because it is so far removed from my current/previous life. I am needing a split from my life in DeKalb, a place of refuge to heal from the ravaging experience of graduate school and to have a new beginning. In a sense, I am feeling the need to go into exile. This desire for a completely new space causes part of me to feel like Jonah fleeing to Tarshish rather than dutifully going to Ninevah (i.e., feeling a bit guilty, like maybe I am simply running from the difficult rather than confronting it), but overall I feel the move will be an invigorating, revitalizing experience. SLC will be a liminal space in my life because I will only be there for two or three years (the stated term of my job), which is also an invigorating factor. It can act as a place of renewal while also presenting itself as a jumping-off point. The structured temporariness of the position is something I need. A spot on my continuing journey rather than an ending.