K.M. Soehnlein

All the Books You Haven't Read

Two things have been on my mind this week. One is that Friday, July 10th is Proust’s birthday. The other is that Newsweek published a Top 100 Books list.

Neither of these things is particularly urgent. It’s 131 years since Marcel Proust was born—not exactly a milestone anniversary. Likewise, the Newsweek list doesn’t represent any particular breakthrough in scholarship or pop culture; it’s a “meta-list”—compiled from ten already existing best-books lists—and in fact when you read the methodology, it seems a little random. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time) shows up on Newsweek’s list at #65, but that's not why I've put these two things together. I've put them together because they both seem to be part of the conversation that I have with myself all the time about reading—about what I have read, what I’m reading now and most importantly, and most confusingly of all, what I should read next, out of all the books I haven't read.

I teach in a creative writing program, which means I put reading lists together for my students. I’m expected to know a lot about literature. I’m expected to read widely. Last year, I read 47 books. (Yes, I keep count.) Some of these were books I read for the first time. Many were books I re-read because I put them on a syllabus and needed to re-familiarize myself. A few of them of them were book-length manuscripts written by students or by friends that I’d been asked to read, to give advice, to give a blurb. Some of them I read purely for pleasure—these were the ones on my nightstand, the ones I read before I fell asleep every night. Some of these were pretty light or pretty thin. It worked out to almost one book a week. That seems like a lot to me; at any rate, it was what my brain could absorb.

And yet it always seems like I haven’t read enough. When I went through Newsweek’s 100 books, I saw that I'd read fewer than a third of them. It actually makes me nervous to admit this. In the world of writers and professors that I spend a lot of time in, admitting that you haven't read something you're supposed to have read is one of the great unspeakables.

Of course, you can’t read everything. No one can. But there’s this attitude that gets passed around, where if you admit, “I haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]” you may hear your words repeated back to you incredulously, “You haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]??” I think writers take pleasure in shaming each other on this subject, and so  we sometimes lie about what we’ve read—or if not out and out lie, at least perform a vague nodding of the head, in reference to whatever book is being discussed at the moment, as a way of not admitting that you haven’t read it. I know I've done that in the past.

So I'm going to come clean here, at least a little. War and Peace, ranked number one on Newsweek's meta-list: never read it. Ulysses, ranked number three: read parts of it, but never got through the whole thing. Number 8 is both The Iliad and The Odyssey: I remember reading some piece of that in high school, but it’s a fuzzy memory at best. Number 9, Pride and Prejudice—nope, and I've lied about that one in the past. Number 10, The Divine Comedy: nope, though I admitted that to my students last year. Add to that Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, most of Faulkner, all of Pynchon. That's just a few of them.

Which brings me back to Proust. A few years ago, my colleague Aaron Shurin told me, "Once you read In Search of Lost Time, your life will become divided into before-you-read-Proust and after-you-read-Proust." That was a grand enough statement to get me interested. Then this year I taught a gay literature class, and I wanted to fill in a few gaps in the gay-lit canon. On top of that, I had a trip to Paris planned, and I wanted to get ready for the trip by reading a French novel. And so, I started to read Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis, the first volume of the seven volumes that make up Proust's masterwork.

I’d tried to read it before and had put it down after a dozen or so pages. His sentences are long and multi-clausal and often without helpful commas where you want them—you can literally lose track of what the sentence is about before you get to the end of it. You can’t skim; if your mind wanders, you have to start over. But something happened this time around. I think the moment I knew I’d stick with it came after I read, appropriately enough, the passage when the young narrator talks about the joys of reading. Specifically, about the power of a novelist’s “creatures” to take hold of a reader’s soul:

… we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all the possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them… (p. 87)

And I thought, after I re-read it a couple of times, that’s exactly right. It’s an elaborate but nonetheless accurate way of talking about the power of a novel over a reader, and also demonstrating that power in the sentences themselves. It’s mesmerizing, if you surrender to it. I surrendered to it. It took me three months, but I finished Swann's Way. I'm not sure it changed my life, but then there are still six more volumes to go...

I wish I could read more. I wish everyone did. Which is why when I finally get around to reading something I’ve wanted to read for a long time, there’s a very sweet satisfaction involved. It’s the pleasure of feeling like you’re conquering that big mountain of knowledge and experience one volume at a time. But more importantly, it's the pleasure of the book itself, which casts us inside its dream, "a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer."

Bon Anniversaire, Monsieur Proust. Thanks for the pleasure.

Lit for Pride

Few things put a smile on my face more than walking into my favorite bookstore and finding my novel on special display, complete with a Staff Favorite card attached. I snapped this pic at Books Inc. in the Castro, where their LGBT Pride Month rack gave a top-shelf slot to You Can Say You Knew Me When.

Most gay writers seem to object to the "gay writer" designation to some degree -- David Sedaris just put his ambivalence on record, saying that yes, he is a gay writer, but please don't shelve his books in "the ghetto" -- though you can't deny that this kind of prominence puts you right in the face of potential readers. (In San Francisco, June is a big month for queer tourists, some of whom are going to wander into a store like Books Inc. and buy something the staff recommends.) No writer wants his or her audience limited, but not everyone has Sedaris's platform or visibility.

Indeed, invisibility is an ongoing issue for books by queer writers, as yesterday's infuriating column in the Washington Post Book World makes clear. Asked by a reader to recommend a "new gay book," editor Dennis Drabelle responds, "not many of these are being published anymore," then goes on to recommend a single British novel many years out of print. As awesome queer website Band of Thebes observed of Drabelle's idiocy,

A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books.

I was at the Lambda Awards last month, and I can assure you that many, many queer-themed books are being published. (Check out the gathered GLBTerati from that night on Homo-Neurotic.com ... I was there in a chartreuse ascot, and posed for this pic with short story writer Justin Torres.) Band of Thebes offers a list of authors whose "new gay books" might have made for a better answer from Drabelle. A couple of current suggestions from my own shelf: Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy, a beautifully composed tale of a grade school baby-gay who finds transcendence through voyeurism, the Hindu god Krishna and early-90s-era Whitney Houston; Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn, which weaves together many stories of the residents (both gay and not) of one Idaho town; Drew Ferguson's The Totally Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second, a funny, sexy first-person teen romp; and Trebor Healey's A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, just re-released , which includes a heartbreaking favorite, "The Mercy Seat." And those are just by the boys.

Seems to me that Dennis Drabelle and The Washington Post Book World ought to print an apology. And how about reviewing a couple of new queer titles while you're at it?

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any evidence that those who hate queers understand the power of gay-themed books, check out this story about Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, first posted on Salon and then covered on the Advocate. A wingnut "Christian" group has not only attempted to ban this book from a library's shelves -- they actually WANT TO BURN IT.

The Regrettable Demise of Eddie Socket

This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of my all-time most-treasured novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, by John Weir. When the book came out I was about the same age (mid-20s) and living in the same location (the East Village) as the main character, Eddie Socket, and I became immediately attached to him a way that happens only every now and then in a lifetime of reading. Eddie was an unlikely hero for literature, a gay slacker with an artistic bent who was "out" but not necessarily "proud" and who was so focused on a handsome, unattainable older man that he wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to his own premature decline (a decline due to...well, it was the 80s...you figure it out). One of the central themes was how to overcome one's own very necessary denial about the worst of life -- how to grow up, in other words, when you're not at all ready. Weir's tone was funny, heartbreaking and angry in turns, and his skill as a storyteller was apparent from page one. The novel quickly became for me a model of the fiction I wanted to write.

In 2001, a special edition of the book was brought out by Triangle Classics, an imprint of the Insight Out Book Club that was dedicated to overlooked queer novels and memoirs. I was enlisted to write the Introduction, and was all too happy to have my say about the book's importance, not just to me but in terms of its place in the lineage of gay fiction. Rereading the novel, I was thrilled to experience it all over again -- and newly struck by its balance of pop and sophistication. At the same time, Alyson, a queer fiction publisher, had picked up the title, too, so suddenly there were two new editions available.

And so I wasn't prepared for the email that came in yesterday, from Alyson, informing me: "Unfortunately, this title has long been out of print.  All remaining stock was destroyed a while back." I'd been trying to track down copies for my university bookstore, because I'm teaching a gay fiction class and I put the novel on my syllabus. The bookstore rep told had informed me she was having trouble filling the order, so I was doing some legwork myself.

Books go out of print all the time, but this one hurt. Maybe it's the violent sound of "destroyed stock," which conjures up a big, evil bonfire. Maybe it's the fact that The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket has never stopped being alive for me, so it's impossible to imagine it only exists in the world in the used copies tracked down through Amazon or Alibris. Maybe it's the fact that Triangle Classics also seems to have ceased to exist. Maybe it's just the extra disappointment at not being able to share this beloved book with my students, most of whom were born after it was first published and who have never had to think about how gay writers addressed the AIDS crisis when it was at its most devastating.

John Weir's second novel, What I Did Wrong, came out in 2006, 17 years after the first one. It's another beautifully written, intimate, wise and funny take on urban life, this time set in the post-everything era in which we now live. I strongly suggest ordering a copy of it -- while it's still in print. Meanwhile, here's hoping that another publisher recognizes the value of Weir's debut, and that Eddie Socket's demise turns out to be reversible after all.

Not under the Updike spell

 I know it's unseemly to speak ill of the dead, but in the midst of the rushing winds of praise for the late John Updike, I've been recalling the piece of his writing that made the strongest impression on me -- a decidedly negative one. In 1999 Updike reviewed Allan Hollinghurst's novel, The Spell, for the New Yorker. The Spell is an unapologetic and unmistakable example of gay fiction -- it concerns a quartet of gay men, including a father and son, along with their lovers and friends, and it doesn't shy away from their sex lives. It's written by an acclaimed gay author, about the intimate lives of realistic, flawed gay characters, and it painted a complicated portrait of 90s gay life. And yet when the New Yorker assigned a reviewer, they chose in Updike not only a heterosexual one, but one who displayed a hostile reaction to the very notion of the lives the novel depicted -- a reviewer who seemed, in a most unsophisticated way, rather shocked at what he found.

Updike -- whose portraits of married, suburban heterosexuals have always been trumpeted as "iconic" and "universal" -- chided Hollinghurst's novels for being "relentlessly gay in their personnel." Finding among Hollinghurst's characters very few women, Updike managed to both exalt and patronize the entire gender: "after a while you begin to long for the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character." (Chirp? Really?) But perhaps the cruelest blow was Updike's statement that "novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous … involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family" -- implying that novels about homosexual partnering were just a lot of "fevered sex." Never mind that Hollinghurst's novel was centered in a family household; the fact that father and son were both gay made the whole enterprise not "sacred." These are shopworn and insidious charges, revived every time gay men seek to claim a place in the culture: at our core, we're unholy, uncivilized, unstable.

Updike's review set off a strong reaction among gay and lesbian writers, who knew an attack when they read one. Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman and Craig Lucas responded with outrage in the press and instigated a letter-writing campaign (though it's not clear that the New Yorker ever published any). Updike remained unapologetic for the homophobic tenor of his review, telling the New York Observer that when it came to homosexuality, "I'd be happy not to discuss it. ... Hollinghurst made it kind of tough." So, you see, it was the relentlessly gay author who forced the iconically straight reviewer to speak those terrible truths.

There are so few outlets for reviews of any kind that when an author of Hollinghurst's stature (he went on to win the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty) is granted one of those precious, high-profile slots, he should be evaluated by someone who can do his work justice -- at the very least by someone who isn't inherently put off by his project. The Spell may not be for everyone, but it deserved the respect that any other book would have gotten; more than that, it deserved a level of evaluation that placed it within its literary tradition. Updike never recanted his words, and I suspect I'm not the only gay writer who hasn't forgotten them.

For me, Updike's pronouncements speak to the larger, and ongoing, problem of the marginalizing of gay-themed fiction. Michael Bronski, writing at the time of the Updike/Hollinghurst brouhaha, noted: "The separation of 'gay lit' from 'American lit' ... mirrors the dominant culture's profound desire to view homosexual experience as fundamentally different."

In the ten years that followed, Updike didn't seem to grown any more comfortable with non-hetero-sexuality. Case in point, his less offensive but somehow still clueless review of Andrew Sean Greer's Story of a Marriage (2008). In this novel, a woman learns her husband has had a male lover in his past; Updike's mostly unflattering review speaks of the "ambiguities of intimacy and bisexuality" and the "fragile strangeness" of Greer's "theme." The idea of bisexuality as ambiguous is yet another tired idea; and Greer's overall theme of how best to love someone you may not really possess isn't particularly strange or "fragile," whatever that would mean.

By all accounts, Updike had his charms; as a writer himself, he certainly made his mark. But as his legacy is bathed in honey, I'll take my chances at mixing a little vinegar into the potion. May he rest in peace; may his bias be buried with him.

Friends With Books: Catherine, Mary, Ada, Mattilda

Friends with books are making news all over the Interweb.

The new short story collection I'm most excited about has just been released: Catherine Brady's The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories. Catherine (or "Kate") and I are in a monthly writers' group, so I've been devouring her beautifully crafted stories in their early drafts for the past few years. Now the world gets to share the wealth. Kate's been honored before by the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Best American Short Stories -- this collection will surely bring more deserved attention her way. I hear there's a release party coming soon. Yay, Kate!

Mary Patrick Kavanaugh -- one of my former students -- had been trying to get the publishing world's attention for her novel, Family Plots: Love, Death and Tax Evasion. Having failed to do so, she staged a very public funeral, "burying" her dream of publishing (watch the festivities here). As it turns out, this got her -- and her now-self-published novel -- a lot of attention. Way to make lemonade, Mary.

Ada Limon -- whose poetry collection, Lucky Wreck, has a lyrical, conversational voice, as if you're listening to her talk intimately, sometimes heatedly, from one table over -- shows up on the Poetry Foundation site offering Five Ways to Practice Poetry. She's got plenty of useful reminders for aspiring writers, like "Cultivate silence... Your own voice is the only thing your poetry needs." Thanks, Ada.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, back from book-tour-land, is interviewed on The Rumpus, and you know he speaks his mind. Mattilda has been chronicling queer, sex-worker, activist/artist life in San Francisco on the page and in performance for years. Now there's a new book that collects this addictive, caustic, wry, observant, effusive writing: So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. I've started reading it, and I'm hooked. Good work, Mattilda.

Strangest convergence of poetry and terrorism. Ever.

Lines from gay poet Mark Doty have turned up in a scary, threatening letter by an unidentified crazy person who claims he will attack the gay bars of Seattle with deadly chemical ricin. Wha? Dan Savage broke the story, and guessed that the letters were not written by a homophobic fundamentalist but by an angry gay man. Again -- WFT?? (Read the comments section of Savage's post -- loaded with words like "fat, unattractive, bitter, closet queen" and you might wish ill upon a few male homosexuals yourself.)

Is this a real threat? Well, the bars are still open in Seattle. Though patrons are advised not to leave their cocktails unattended.

Meanwhile, Doty, the National Book Award winner for poetry, has written with a heavy heart about "the reader you don't want."

The Hot New Dead Poet

Living in San Francisco, preoccupied with writers and writing and books, I've known the name of legendary underground gay poet Jack Spicer for a long time. But I haven't known his poetry. I guess that's about to change, because 2008 ended with the dead-for-forty-years Spicer getting major attention from all over, and now I'm intrigued.

Kevin Killian -- novelist, poet, playwright, all-around San Francisco literary impresario -- has, with poet Peter Gizzi, edited a comprehensive collection of Jack Spicer's writing that will certainly land him on nightstands and coffee tables all over. The book has the excellent title My Vocabulary Did This To Me, words Spicer uttered on his deathbed. Spicer was out and rebellious back in the chilly 50s, but also tortured by his love life and by what the authors call his "unattractive" appearance.

I'd always assumed somehow that Spicer's poems would be difficult, like some of those other mid-century biggies like Ashbery and Olson, but the excerpts posted in the Times Review and elsewhere indicate a surprisingly direct voice that reminds me of Wieners, or O'Hara at his most accessible. This one is called "A Book of Music":

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers.  Where
Did it end?  There is no telling.  No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end.  Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons.  Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

The rebirth of a poet's reputation long after his death is always a bittersweet thing. He struggled for readers and respect during his life, then slipped away into obscurity. Years later the work is alive for a new generation, which doesn't help the once-destitute poet. Reminds me of something a writing teacher told me a long, long time ago: "You're writing for people who aren't even born yet."

Links I've been clicking

Crisis time: There have been plenty of books about coming out, but Crisis may be the first one to put front and center the abuse LGBT teens endure at the hands of organized religion. As this Rick Warren business continues to fester, let's make the point even louder: Just because you justify your judgments with religion doesn't make them any less destructive. (Thanks to the LGBT Book Blog.)

Inaugural podium: Interesting take on Elizabeth Alexander's selection from journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who once had a poem workshopped by Alexander. She sees Obama's selection of Alexander as part of his overal "competence aesthetic" of selecting those who can get the job done. (Hmm, but what does that say about Rick Warren?)

World best: I was recently grumbling about the lack of gay fiction on the end-of-year best-of lists. So it was a nice surprise to see Alastair McCartney's The End of the World Book show up on the Seattle Times list. Check out the spooky trailer a shirtless McCartney made for his book.

Rumpus room: The Rumpus -- a new site that's bursting at the seams with juicy stuff to read -- has their own take on best-of lists. They asked a bunch of folks to list the best books they read in 2008 that were published before 2008. Among those they got an answer from was, no kidding, General David Petraeus. Um, how'd that happen? Isn't he in charge of Afghanistan now?

Closet case: Now that I've read three reviews of Susan Sontag's early journals, can I please skip the actual book itself?

A Gay Poet at Obama's Inauguration, II

How about giving the inaugural honor to our new U.S. poet laureate -- Kay Ryan? That's been the big response among friends and colleagues to my previous post.

Ryan's got great appeal. She's lesbian educator from Marin county whose marriage this summer was one of the 18,000 now in post-Prop-8 limbo -- a compelling representation of the work to be done in the next four years! But Ryan's poetry gently resists "representation." The self in her poems is less a politically proscribed identity than an observer of mystery. Her poetry is delightful -- compressed, rigorously inquisitive, witty and full of wonder -- and would certainly bring something unprecedented to the official proceedings: a quest for contemplation, solitude and slowing down. Her poem "Blandeur," from her collection Say Uncle, begins with the lines:

If it please God,
let less happen.

You can read "Blandeur" in the text of this interview in which Ryan is quoted saying that poetry is "the most secret, the most private form of communication in language."

See Ryan interviewed earlier this year by Charlie Rose. And check out my previous inaugural candidate, Mark Doty, profiled as the "poet of the year." (Thanks to Silliman's Blog for the links.)

A Gay Poet at Obama's Inauguration

Will there be a poet onstage at Obama's inauguration? Let's start a campaign to give the honor to the great gay poet Mark Doty, whose Fire to Fire just won the National Book award.

Clinton brought in Maya Angelou, and JFK had Robert Frost. Bush had...oh, nevermind. He didn't. (Republicans and poetry, not much of a match.) The AP is suggesting Phillip Levine, a rust-belt genius I greatly admire whose words would, I imagine, be a timely pick for our collapsoconomy.

But I'm pushing for Mark Doty.

Doty's poems are wise and heartfelt and occasionally angry -- best of all, they are accessible. Generally two-to-three pages long, written in clear, vibrant sentences, they feel like short-short stories, full of scenic description and real human beings, that burst into light at the end -- the kinds of epiphanies we want from art, and poems.

One of several of his poems called "Theory of a Marriage" starts out with Doty and his husband Paul (that would be novelist Paul Lisicky) going for therapeutic backrubs in Chinatown and ends up offering a vision of how love and commitment and sacrifice work in longterm relationships. Another illustrates love by depicting how their dogs react to affection. There's some humor at work here, too -- not a bad quality in a poem.

When Clinton picked Maya Angelou to read a poem at his first inaguration, he sent a kind of message about the necessity to hear the voice of a major black writer at a particular historical moment. As gay civil rights take center stage in our national dialogue, Obama could assert something similar about the ongoing struggle toward progress and equality.