I interviewed my friend, author Sarah Schulman, about her recently released nonfiction book about ACT UP New York. It's called Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. You can read an edited version of the interview on Queerty.
The full interview lasted an hour and a half. I'm making the (lightly edited) version of the transcript available by clicking here: Download Transcription of Interview with Sarah Schulman.Share
I love talking about movies almost as much as I love watching them, so the chance to share my list of favorites of the past decade is really the hope for more conversation. The films on my list (below) are mostly those I’ve watched more than once, and will likely watch again. This was the decade that married movie-watching with instant gratification—DVD, DVR, Netflix. I probably saw more movies in the last ten years than I’d seen in the previous twenty, and I saw them when I wanted to see them. I recently came home from a screening of Nine, trying to remember 8 1/2, the Fellini film on which Nine was loosely based but which I hadn’t seen since college. I went to Netflix, clicked a link and was watching a streamed version of 8 1/2 within minutes. Seeing the source so quickly changed what I thought of the newer film; suddenly they were in conversation with each other (or in battle maybe, with a clear, classic victor).
The other reason list-making appeals to me is that it provides me with a picture of what I value. Turns out that films that put sexuality in the forefront are a big deal to me, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone who's read my fiction. Also making a big showing are films about self-discovery—whether the full-on emo blast of Into the Wild, or the halting, semi-satirical Year of the Dog. At the same time, I’m clearly drawn to the collective story—interwoven plot strands with multiple protagonists—a genre that emerged strongly over the last ten years, abetted by increasingly sophisticated editing technology. In different ways, films in this genre—the documentary-ish quality of Shortbus, the internationalism of Babel or the sitcom-writ-large that is Happy Endings—seemed to say that no one story tells the whole story, in a world that keeps getting smaller.
I recognize that I haven’t seen everything, and that my taste has its limits. Certain genres I don’t seek out, like horror or action, and I definitely favor American indie dramas and comedies, with a good dose of documentary and foreign films in the mix. In my first version of this list, I had almost 100 entries, but that seemed like overkill on one hand and cowardice—failure to take a stand—on the other. Going out on a limb a little more boldly, I humbly offer my top 20 movies of the '00s.
1. Shortbus (2006). A film that was absolutely of its time, and also ahead of the curve for critics and some audiences, Shortbus documented the emotional life of the artistic and sexual underground (in NYC) during a decade when art and sex were under a constant dulling threat from mass culture. John Cameron Mitchell, whose Hedwig and the Angry Inch could have easily been on this list, too, was the director, guiding a cast of unknowns through sexually graphic, emotionally raw performances as potent as any of the star turns on this list.
3. Far From Heaven (2002). Todd Haynes was a cherished director in the previous decade, with films like Poison and Safe. In this one, he used a bigger budget to show his intimate understanding of the melodramas of the 1950s, ala Douglas Sirk, and managed to create from old conventions something that felt really new. His leading lady, Julianne Moore, was at her peak here; hers is probably my favorite female performance of the last ten years.
4. Lust, Caution (2007). Ang Lee might be the director of the decade, beginning with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and building up to the phenomenon of Brokeback Mountain. But it was this film about covert action in revolutionary China that really blew me away. The story of a female spy whose relationship to the man she is supposed to kill actually brings on her own demise, it is troubling and upsetting and a masterpiece of characterization and tension. And the sex scenes, I mean, wow.
6. Babel (2006). The political is personal in this film that skips across borders and continents, depicting how the lives of strangers are inextricably linked in our “globalized” world. This film has more memorable scenes than I have room to name—the ecstasy trip in Tokyo through the eyes of a deaf girl; the Mexican nanny (the amazing Adriana Barraza) deported by Homeland Security; the American husband in Northern Africa (an awesome Brad Pitt) trying to save his wife after she’s hit by a stray bullet. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who made two other really great films, Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003).
8. I Heart Huckabees (2004). At some point in the middle of the decade, everyone I knew was in a Bush-induced depression. This film seemed to encapsulate that mood and mindset perfectly. Jason Schwartzman goes on a quest to solve his existential angst, wanting to overcome helplessness (he doesn’t) and understand if coincidence means synchronicity or randomness (hmm…). Mark Wahlberg steals the show hitting Jason Schwartzman in the face with a big red rubber ball. Sidebar: Director David O. Russell became notorious for his on-set screaming at Lily Tomlin, a hissyfit that we all got to watch online—a very emblematic 00’s moment.
9. The Cockettes (2002). The documentary that reinvigorated the idea of the counterculture in a decade that tried to destroy it. My friend, director David Weissman, unearthed the surviving members of the early '70s San Francisco hippie-drag-acidhead theater collective to tell a story of art, freedom and survival. The glittery effects of this film will be felt for years in the worlds of performance and fashion and communities where personal expression is paramount.
11. Before Night Falls (2000). Painter Julian Schnabel proved he was a great film director when he made stirring art out of the heroic life of gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, nobly brought to life by Javier Bardem. Arenas, who survived imprisonment and forced labor in Castro’s Cuba only to die of AIDS in NYC, was a prolific novelist, poet and memoir writer who still has much to teach us. His work will likely stay in print thanks to this film. (Bonus: Johnny Depp as a drag queen smuggling contraband inside her butt. Hey-ey!)
12. Mysterious Skin (2004). Joseph Gordon Leavitt rightfully became a star in this enthralling performance as a gay kid fucked up by, but also liberated by, surviving childhood abuse. Scott Heim’s beautifully written novel was masterfully handled by Gregg Araki, whose direction had never seemed so right as it did in this film.
14. Bad Education (2004). How does Pedro Almodovar keep making so many excellent films? Does it have something to with the way financing flows to filmmakers in Spain, or is it simply his pure talent and tenacity? I also adored Volver (2006), and I liked a lot of Talk to Her (2002), but this one, with its queer mystery plot, is the one I hold most dear. Oh yeah, there’s also Gael Garcia Bernal showing lots of skin. Mucho gracias.
15. Milk (2008). The biopic trend has become overbearing, but this film was more than just the life-story of gay hero Harvey Milk. It put the struggle for LGBT equality into historical context at exactly the right moment. And—often overlooked—it was a really varied piece of filmmaking: the multiplying split-screen telephone conversations, the strobe-lit Coors boycott, the pressurized come-out-to-your-parents phone call (an homage to The Boys in the Band). Director Gus Van Sant made five other films in the last ten years (!), including the mesmerizing Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005). Milk bonus: my very own handsome husband was an onscreen extra cruising Sean Penn in a coffee shop. That’s right, baby…
16. Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005). Director and star Miranda July’s take on the interwoven-cast-of-characters was like a series of linked short stories—no surprise, since she also wrote one of the best books of the decade, the short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You. The tone here is so gentle it’s almost a whisper, but at times the comedy is outrageously funny. Extra points for best (mis)use of emoticons in any movie ever: ))<>((
17. Once (2006). An Irish guy playing music on the street; a Czech woman with a broken vacuum; a not-quite love story, with music. Really lovely music. This was one of those came-out-of-nowhere films, with unknown stars and an unknown director (John Carney, from Ireland), that just knocked out everyone who saw it with its quiet, honest, believable depiction of the lives of ordinary, nearly invisible people. It also had really great music. Remember the enthusiasm of the stars when they won the Best Song Oscar? I still get choked up thinking about it.
18. The Squid and the Whale (2005). Seems like it’s rarer and rarer to get an American film made about a simple story—a marriage falling apart, rebound love, the kids discovering sex in the midst of adult turmoil, etc. But Noah Baumbach did it, and beautifully. Who can forget the dad (Jeff Daniels, in a perfect performance), playing the most inappropriately aggressive game of tennis; or the older brother (Jesse Eisenberg) pretending that Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” is a song he wrote; or the younger brother (Owen Kline) who, having learned to jerk off, starts wiping his semen everywhere he goes...?
19. Happy Endings (2005). Writer/director Don Roos gave us a great comic ensemble making the most out of interwoven romances and relationships in flux. I love everyone in this cast: Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale and—a great surprise—Tom Arnold. There’s also Josh Ritter, who’s adorable, as a kid trying to come out, and a subplot involving gay couples trying to procreate, a subject that was very much at the center of the world I lived in over the past ten years, though happily not as messed up as in this charming movie.
20. Man on Wire (2008). The film that seemed to speak most deeply to the losses felt by New Yorkers after 9/11 never mentioned 9/11 at all. This documentary, directed by James Marsh, about the adventurous spirit of prankster Philippe Petit, who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers in 1974, was pure, joyous entertainment.
Honorable Mention: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. There was a moment in 2004 when I was laid up with the flu and my only relief was watching the first three films in this series. It was a slow build, but by the end of #3 (Prisoner of Azkaban), I was hooked. My favorite of the bunch is #4, the Mike Newell-directed Goblet of Fire, with its eye-popping Quidditch World Cup, its edge-of-the-seat underwater race, and the terrifying appearance of Voldemort in the final moments. Dismissed as kid stuff and ignored by the Oscars, these films have been one of my steadiest (least) guilty pleasures. Here’s to (big-budget) magic.
So there you go. What are you favorites? What on this list do you love, or hate? Which of my fixations do you share? Converse.
This week’s gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in
Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the
rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional
wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing
visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer
dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard’s murder 11
years ago seem nearly tame in comparison—makes me wonder, do we really even
understand homophobic violence?
This question had been on my mind since last week,
when I saw a San Francisco performance by the British group DV8 called To Be
Straight With You. DV8 combined its hallmark physical theater with audio culled
from man-on-the-street interviews spouting blatant
homophobia, and more personal testimony from people who had been victimized by anti-gay violence. Some of the victims were refugees from countries like Iraq, Zimbabwe and Jamaica, where anti-gay hostility is so culturally accepted that queer people are often forced to seek asylum in places like the U.S. and Britain, which offer some degree of legal protection.
The vocal collage in To Be Straight With You created for me a sense that anti-LGBT violence is a global
crisis, something akin to “ethnic cleansing.” (Indeed, in Jamaica, where
homophobic culture flourishes through the hatred inspired by murder music from singers like Buju Banton, one community recently declared a Gay Eradication Day, demanding that gays and lesbians leave the town or "suffer the consequences.") Is there any other population in the world today who can be put to
death in 7 countries, as LGBT people can in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia? That these seven countries are
all Islamic and bound to Sharia law explains why DV8 put a particular, though not exclusive, focus on homophobia
among Britain’s large Muslim population. The question of how organized religions promulgate this global crisis was
the underlying thesis of the entire piece.
Religions are kept alive within the structure of the nuclear family. What DV8’s stage piece
drove home was how the nuclear family is more often than not the conduit for organized religion to transmit homophobia. The strongest moment of To Be Straight With You featured one dancer jump-roping nonstop (above) while voicing the reminiscence of a
Muslim queer boy in England who, after coming out, was chased down and stabbed by
his father, with the help of his older brother. The boy survived, retaining enough sassiness and strength to find his way to gay pride parade at
age 14.
Familial homophobia is the subject of writer Sarah
Schulman's new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which Doug Ireland in Gay City News
has dubbed "one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in
years." The same night I was watching DV8 in San Francisco, Schulman (pictured) was delivering
the prestigious Kessler Lecture in New York City. Among Schulman's assertions is that homophobia—long understood to originate from the fear of one’s own innate
or latent attraction to one’s gender—is not a phobia at all, but a "pleasure center." She writes:
"...homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the
pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist
change that would deflate their sense of superiority. Homophobia makes
heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun."
I think Schulman's on to something, but I think there's more going on. The attack in Puerto
Rico, the Shiite death squads who patrol Baghdad for queers to torture and
kill, and the exhortations to violence by Jamaican dancehall singers are all based
on something that seems deeper than “enacting superiority.” The leap to
violence might best be understood by research done at the University of Arkansas in
2002. Psychologists noted that anti-gay feeling is often less a matter of fear than of
disgust. Homophobes have been trained to see gay people as dirty and contagious—something diseased than can spread. Arkansas researcher Jeffrey Lohr notes,
"While fear causes a 'get me away from that' reaction, disgust manifests as 'get that away from me.' These different emotional reactions can lead to very different behaviors, according to Lohr. 'The same emotions that mediate attitude can mediate behavior,' he said. 'If fear mediates avoidance, other emotions may mediate attack.'"
The oft-quoted Bible verse used to support violence against
gays, from Leviticus, refers to man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," with its connotation of disgust and loathing, and says,
“blood shall be upon them.” Does anyone need any clearer example of how a religion can propagate anti-gay violence—comparing the way some people naturally
love with a disease that needs to be wiped out? In DV8’s piece, a young woman
from South London claims not to be prejudiced but says of gay sex, “It’s
nasty." Disgust like hers is the end result of ancient tribal dogma turned into scripture by organized religion, propagated within family structures and unquestioned at the street-level by poorly educated youth.
Can art adequately address this kind of entrenched disgust? One of the feelings I
was left with, amid many, after watching the DV8 show, was that it had created an argument for the importance of tough penalties for hate-based violence. The good news is that after years of trying to enact federal hate crimes laws, our Democrat-controlled Congress finally succeeded. Last month, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Just as significantly, Obama signed legislation that finally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the U.S., a law that had been on the books for 22 years. For all the shortcomings of the
Obama's actions on gay civil rights, these two laws strike me as an especially important tandem victory, as strong a stance as any world leader has taken to ensure not just that gay people are protected under
the law but that this country actually can serve as a kind of safe haven for
those who have nowhere else to go.
After signing the Hate Crimes Act—which, it's worth noting, also includes religious belief as a protected class—Obama spoke from the podium [video], saying,
"You understand, that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits. Not only to inflict harm but to instill fear...No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love."
I was particularly moved by his inclusion of that final phrase. Perhaps the best way to confront the global crisis of hate that we are facing is to remember we are fighting for our right to express our love.
Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out under the weighty need for revision. So you get to work again, but the deeper you get into it, the less sure you are of yourself. In your uncertainty, you turn against the writing--or rather, you feel that it has turned against you. Instead of a beautiful bloom you've planted, it's a poisonous plant that will kill you if you get too close. Maybe you abandon the whole thing to a folder on your desktop. Maybe you keep at it, draft after draft, remembering the delight you took in that initial blossoming but, as in a relationship whose passion has wilted, wondering if you'll ever feel the early excitement again.
During the four years I spent writing Robin and Ruby, I suffered this in a big way. I started the book as a kind of challenge to myself: to write from Ruby MacKenzie's point of view, rescuing her from her "supporting" status in The World of Normal Boys, giving her the star treatment I always thought she deserved. I loved the idea of writing from a young woman's point of view, something I hadn't done much of before. I liked the idea of taking a break from the "gay fiction" of my previous two novels. And I was excited to set a story in the mid-1980s, amid New Wave music and Reagan-era politics and all that uptight fashion.
But somewhere along the way, I lost my trust in the story. What I thought would be a short novel was growing into something full-length. In order to tell Ruby's story, I needed her brother Robin, and suddenly he was taking over (it seemed I had a gay male protagonist, after all). The '80s turned out to be pretty complicated, too: I had to go back to the terrors of AIDS, to the confusions of emerging identity politics, to places in my own youth that weren't comfortable.
Worst of all, writing a sequel was hard work. Though I wasn't making up characters from scratch, I did have a lot of back-story to fill in (the two books take place eight years apart). In letting the characters grow up, I questioned if I was being true to them. Would readers of the first book--many of whom had written to me over the years, asking for a sequel--connect with this story? Would I let them down? The pressure of expectations started to overshadow the writing of the story, and I lost track of what I wanted to say and why I was even bothering. I fell out of love with Ruby and with Robin, and in the darkest hours, I lost faith in myself as a writer.
The key was perseverance--and the support of some of my close friends, who read the early drafts and encouraged me even when I was resistant to believing them. Along the way, it was important to take some time away from the manuscript, letting it solidify away from my judgmental editorial eye. There's really no better way to see your own work clearly than to leave it alone for a while. It's much easier to revise a chapter if the memory of having spent an entire weekend working on it isn't so immediate.
Last week I received the typeset page-proofs of Robin and Ruby (title page pictured above). It's finally starting to look like a novel. I can see how all that struggle, support and perseverance has created something concrete. The story is much bigger than I imagined it would be--and also more emotionally intimate. I think I might even be falling back in love with it again.
Perhaps Obama is once again demonstrating political agility, showing everyone how this kind of thing is done: Let’s clean up this little mess so we can get back to the bigger issues, like this whopper of a health care bill I’m trying to get passed. But there’s a risk to today’s event, the risk that the whole thing looks less like teaching than like backtracking—an attempt to unruffle the feathers of the law-and-order types who were vocally pissed when Obama said Crowley “acted stupidly” in ordering Gates out of his home and arresting him for disorderly conduct. In that sense, Obama seems to be doing the very thing that he’s been doing for months, to the frustration of many of his supporters, which is backing off his original strong, truthful language in order to “calibrate” for the sake of making sure everyone is a little bit satisfied at the end of the day.
In this case, the truth—that it was “stupid” of the Cambridge police to arrest a man in his own home for being disorderly, since in fact his “disorderly” behavior had been prompted by their insistence that his presence in his own home was suspicious—was apparently more than Obama could get away with speaking. This strikes me as absurd. As Jol’s New York Minutes noted:
But the story of Gates’s arrest has been, from the moment it rocketed into the news, a story of competing narratives. There are of course the contrasting versions of what happened that day between Gates and Crowley. But there are also the larger cultural narratives at work: the irony of the scholarly, elderly professor living in a good neighborhood but mistaken for a criminal by a neighbor; the narrative of the victimized black man, who no matter how successful he is—or, in Gates’s case, how elderly, disabled (he walks with a cane) or close to (or inside of) his own home he stands—is still a target for the cops; the narrative of the “uppity Negro,” dragged to the stockades when he tries to claim his power (a narrative that not only pertains to Gates’s arrest but to Obama’s backtracking); the narrative of snobbery: Gates the upper-middle class, well-connected, college-educated man speaking down to a civil servant (he allegedly yelled at Crowley, “Do you know who you’re messing with?”); the narrative of the good cop who for all his best intentions nonetheless can’t surpass the historical biases of his profession, can’t admit he’s wrong, won’t apologize and so, in the end, has to be pacified with that manliest of American beverages, a domestic beer.For the Cambridge police to demand an apology from the president for calling their utterly inept actions ‘stupid’ is akin to a restaurant's demanding an apology from a food critic for pronouncing a pot of feces stew ‘unappetizing’ upon first bite.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man was published in 1997, and it bears the faded tint of yesterday’s news—the Million Man March, the Simpson Trial, the rise of Colin Powell’s political fortunes after the first Gulf War. But its focus on the narratives that attach themselves to the lives of prominent black men, and his attempt to retrieve individuality for his subjects from those narratives, seems absolutely ripe for the situation today. I haven’t read anything that Gates has written about Obama’s ascendancy, but I suspect that he’d approve of how Obama was handling not only this personal incident, but current affairs in general. “Black America needs allies more than it needs absolution,” Gates noted back when Bill Clinton was being facetiously referred to as our “first black president.” Perhaps that was why Gates has stepped away from suggestions that he might sue the Cambridge police, now that the possibility of bonding over a brew has emerged. At the same time, the pull to see his blackness as a pure experience never to be understood by white oppressors—blackness as, essentially, a more authentic identity than whiteness—is something he admits is difficult to resist: “You might inveigh against, say, the ideology of authenticity, but in some measure you participate in it all the same.”
Weighing these competing pressures, he asks of his various black male subjects, “How does it feel to be a paradox?” I suspect not only Gates but Obama, too, is living out that paradox once again today, while the rest of us sit back and look at them, trying to decide what they mean.
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.
Something is going on right now with writers. Writers are getting angry. Angry about bad reviews. More to the point: writers are venting their anger against their critics in a public way. In the past week, a writer I know used her Twitter account to vent (her word) against a New Yorker reviewer by posting "may she rot in hell"—and two relatively high-profile incidents of writers mouthing off about their reviewers have rippled out across the inter-twitter-web. "Mouthing off" isn't quite right; these writers see themselves as striking back. Writer-versus-reviewer is not particularly novel. But what seems notable to me about these latest incidents is that writers are simply fed up with people talking smack about them. Writers understand the consequences of a bad review; frankly, it's pissing folks off, and they're using technology to respond in self-defense.
Incident number one: Alice Hoffman. The New York Times reported last week on Hoffman's "Twitter outburst" over a Boston Globe review of her novel The Story Sisters:
Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”
By Monday, Ms. Hoffman had evidently deleted her Twitter account. “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” Ms. Hoffman said in a statement forwarded by her publisher...
Incident number two: Alain de Botton. After critic Caleb Crain pointed readers of his blog to a review he wrote of de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a review that accused de Botton, among other things, of "mean-spiritedness," the reviewed author found a forum for his strike-back: not Twitter, but Crain's own blog. In the comments section, de Botton wrote:
Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
"I will hate you till the day I die." "She's a moron." "May she rot in hell." Wow. One can only marvel at this kind of venom, being unveiled in such a public way, and with so much sanctimoniousness. De Botton does himself no favors by claiming that he is backed up by "all those who have read [his book] with anything like impartiality," as if he is the judge of who has or hasn't read his work with "impartiality." The irony is that to the outsider, Crain's write-up of de Botton's book reads like the kind of classy old-school review that every author hopes for; if such a review turns out to be negative, you're supposed to just suck it up as par for the course. In reality, the classy old-school review is a doomed species. So every review one manages to score carries that much more proportional weight.
In the end, de Botton, like Hoffman, recanted. Sort of. De Botton claimed, on another website, that he mistook his posting for "private" correspondence, saying metaphorically that it had been "inadvertently broadcast" to a wider audience than he had imagined.
I suspect that "outbursts" like Hoffman's and "naive" responses like de Botton's are the signs of a larger frustration most writers are feeling, not only about mainstream criticism, but with the at-large and ad-hoc culture of criticism that we all live with now. Writers are more beleaguered than ever, not least because we are more at the mercy of opinion than ever -- so many motherfucking opinions! The rant-and-post reviewer, on Amazon, on a blog, in a tweet, invests nothing more than a few minutes of his or her time, and the writer, who has put in a lot of time, has to live with the spleen. What writer can't relate to de Botton's plaintive wail: "that's two years of work down the drain"? And what writer didn't feel for Alice Hoffman when in the end she retracted, with this bit of humble pie: "Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing"?
This is a dilemma that strikes me close to home. I got a shitty review from Robert Julian in the Bay Area Reporter for my second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, one that appeared early in the book's life and thus (as I saw it), managed to poison the climate for the novel's release. But I didn't—I couldn't—go on the offensive against Julian, no matter how much I thought his reading of my book was shallow and off-mark; because Robert Julian was the very critic whose enthusiastic review of my first novel, The World of Normal Boys, was among the earliest and strongest boosts I'd received. How could the same guy who loved my first book so much hate my second to the same degree? I didn't understand it; neither could I attack him for meanspiritedness or anything else. It seemed best to simply ignore him, and what he'd written about me, but it wasn't easy, knowing that the review was out there, casting its influence. Once the sting of his slam wore off, I came away with the understanding that a review, good or bad, is no more the "truth" than any other single opinion. But you still have to live with it.
The ability for the single opinion to find a platform, and an audience, is what writers are so pissed off about. Every opinion gets heard today, whether on Amazon or Twitter or someone's Facebook page or some random blog. Opinions get dashed off all the time, and writers suffer for them, and people like Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton—and my writer friend who used her Twitter account to wish her reviewer a hellish afterlife—all seem to be saying at the very same moment: You're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to offer, in response, a very loud Fuck You.
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.
Last night at the San Francisco Main Library I was thrilled to be honored as a Library Laureate, one of 35 writers selected as part of an annual tribute to the local literary community -- and as a way to fundraise for the Friends of the Library. It was quite a schmancy night -- the wine flowed, the catered hors d'œuvres kept coming and folks were dressed to kill. The theme of the night was Evolution -- in honor of the Darwin bicentenary. A handful of men wore Darwin garb -- bowlers and beards -- and there were women dressed with feathery references to various exotic and endangered species. (Someone dressed as Annie Oakley and someone else as Indiana Jones, and though I didn't really get the evolutionary connection there, I do love a costume.)
After a group photo -- how do you corral thirty five adults onto a stage for a posed pic? very slowly -- and a wine reception, they sent everyone off to different wings of the library to eat dinner at tables for ten, with five tables in a room. I don't travel in the major-donor circle a whole lot, so I didn't know what to expect, but Kevin and I were at a lively table, which included another writer, an literary agent and a number of library volunteers. The two women I sat between were great conversationalists. (I learned a lot about Andrew Carnegie's role in creating free public libraries. "He wasn't very good to his workers," I was told, "but he was good to the public.") The "laureates" had been asked to prepare five-minutes worth of remarks to deliver during the (very pretty) dessert course; our subject was to be evolution, or our own work, or libraries in general, and as is often the case with a rather loose assignment, some folks were quite prepared and held the room's attention, others didn't and rambled. The highlight for me was author and critic Jonathon Keats's commentary about how evolution has actually been a somewhat "stupid" process; he cited such evidence as the fallible human eye and our awkward spinal column, which doesn't make it very easy for folks to sleep at night.
For my remarks, I had put out a call via email and Facebook asking for "what the library means to you." Within a few hours I was flooded with replies -- everyone, it seems, had specific memories to share. I pieced them together and added my own; I even dug out my 1974 summer reading card, issued by the Westwood Public Library. Here's what I said:
After I spoke, a woman at my table told me that the summer reading program still goes on at her local branch library in Noe Valley, in much the same way it did in Westwood. I was also told that the services the library provides are, since the economy tanked last year, in greater demand than ever. The good news from last night is that the Laureates dinner is going to help meet that demand: $250,000 was raised. That's a lot of Friends for the library.
SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM.
Here's something to do this week that fits your recession-budget (as in, it's free) while keeping you in touch with the topical world (can you say Pakistan?). American/Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenuddin is in the midst of his first ever U.S. book tour and he's got five readings in San Francisco and environs in the next week.
I first saw his story Nawabdin Electrician in the New Yorker -- apparently Salman Rushdie did, too, because he selected it for Best American Short Stories 2008. It was the kind of writing that took me a page or two to get into, in the way that unfamiliar settings, like the Pakistani dessert, and names you're not sure how to pronounce (just like in those old Russian novels) can create enough cognitive dissonace that your brain resists sinking into the actual narrative. But I'm glad I fought through, because the writing has a lot of sly humor and the characters are unpredictable and unforgettable. In this story, there's Nawab, a crafty old electrician who has "a signature ability: a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of its meters, so cunningly performed that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings." This makes him especially popular with an upper class estate owner, K.K. Harouni, who agrees to get Nawab a motorcycle for his years of service. One night on that motorcycle, the electrician stops to help a stranger on the side of the road and....well, as in all good stories, something goes terribly, terribly wrong. How Nawab reacts makes for a truly jaw-dropping ending...one that sent me looking for more of the author's work.
Mueennuddin's stories -- eight in all -- have been published now under the title In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. The book, his first, is a story cycle -- each story stands on its own, but together, through interconnected characters and settings, they make up a complete whole. In this case, the connection is Harouni, the landowner; his relatives, associates, servants, and so on, each get their moment in the spotlight, creating a mosaic portrait up and down the levels of Pakistani society. I've now read three of the stories, including the title story, in which the corrupt old Harouni takes a young cousin as a mistress, and we watch from her point of view as she adjusts to this role that she never asked for but is determined to make the most of.
The 45-year old author has a Pakistani father and an American mother and has spent his life going back and forth between both countries -- he used to practice law in New York; now he runs a mango farm in Pakistan. The collection is making a big splash -- he's in the top ten on Amazon, is talking to the Wall Street Journal about his cross-cultural biography, and is interviewed by Beatrice about his favorite Turgenev short story.
You can catch Mueenuddin (pronounced Mwen-o-Dean) at City Lights in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 25, followed by readings in Danville, Corte Madera and Berkeley; later he hits Pasadena, Portland, Seattle, and NYC.
UPDATE: I'm planning to check out his reading on Sunday, March 1, at 3:00 at 1:00 in the afternoon, in Oakland at Diesel Books on College Ave. Look for me there.