Gaya Scienza

A Love Story

Milk, Gus Van Sant's movie on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America, opened this week of Thanksgiving and has generated its lot of controversy. David Mixner has expressed his regrets that he did not speak out when Brokeback Mountain was released, "as we allowed this work of art to become a national joke." He does not want the same thing to happen to Milk. Maybe he is exaggerating a bit (a little humor...), but it is true that when James Franco (who plays the role of Harvey Milk's lover in the film) was recently interviewed on the Letterman Show most of the talk was about how it felt to kiss another man...

But I don't want to talk about Milk since it has not yet been released in this not-so-remote part of Connecticut where I live, and I have not seen it... (reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both excellent)

I want to tell you about Victim, an extraordinary moving film of 1961 (Dir. Basil Dearden, Allied Film Makers), a black and white thriller, and love story, set in London, beautifully transferred to DVD. Rent or buy it without delay!

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was published in Britain in 1957 after the committee, chaired by Lord John Wolfenden, had been working for three years. The so-called Wolfenden Report recommended that "homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". The report generated considerable public debate and it was only in 1967 that the Sexual Offences Act, passed by the United Kingdom Parliament, decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in England...

This is the background on which the movie is set. Melville Farr, a successful and happily married barrister, gets involved in a blackmail ring targeting homosexuals. The plot, wonderfully constructed, should not be unveiled. Dirk Bogarde (as Farr) does an impressive performance in a tale of love, courage, dignity and self-acceptance. It was the first British film to deal explicitly with homosexuality, and this was 1961! One of the greatest gay films of all times...

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Do you know Adam Mars-Jones? I was asked this same question yesterday? In the last issue of the TLS, featuring the Best Books of the Year, Margaret Drabble writes:

"Pilcrow (Faber) by Adams Mars-Jones is one of the most remarkable novels I have read in recent years. I would say it was a tour de force, if that didn't make it sound formidable, which it is not. It is as intelligent, enjoyable, fluent, witty and engaging as his shorter fiction. How he contrives to make his obsession with ill health and his addiction to medical textbooks so life-enhancing is a mystery to me. Proust is the nearest parallel, and Mars-Jones's narrator's description of his grandmother's virtuoso scrambling of eggs deserves to stand by Proust's two-page description of the boiling of a pan of milk. The hymn to Velcro is also a delight. This book is packed with factual information, on subjects as wide-ranging as wheelchairs, adolescent sex, song lyrics from musicals, games and gadgets of the 1950s, the sadism of nurses and the optimistic outlook of Quaker schools. It is a joy and a conundrum, and I look forward eagerly to the next installment, with further adventures of his extraordinary protagonist."

You, no doubt, want to learn more... As a starting point, Wikipedia informs us that Mars-Jones is a British novelist and critic born in 1954. He has published several collections of short stories, including one co-written with Edmund White. Pilcrow is his second novel.

Now, Amazon.co.uk (the book is only available in the UK) provides the following synopsis:

"Meet John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in modern fiction. If the minority is always right then John is practically infallible. Growing up disabled and gay in the 1950s, circumstances force John from an early age to develop an intense and vivid internal world. As his character develops, this ability to transcend external circumstance through his own strength of character proves invaluable. Extremely funny and incredibly poignant, this is a major new novel from a writer at the height of his powers."

The next thing you want is get your hands on the book...

2008.11.30

The Beauty and the Beast

Saturday, at the local public library, I found, a brand new copy of Neil Bartlett's last novel Skin Lane (Serpent's Tail, 2007, 320 pp.). I had appreciated his previous novel, Mr Clive and Mr Page (1996). Gregory Woods in his History of Gay Literature (1998) refers to Bartlett's first book, a very personal essay on Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? (1988), as "extraordinary." Skin Lane is a masterly written story, a gay version of The Beauty and the Beast, set in London in 1967, a year with a cruelly cold winter and hot summer, and also the year the Sexual Offences Act passed by the United Kingdom Parliament decriminalized homosexual acts in private between two men...

***

Levon Aronian, one of the top world chess players, while in Dresden, Germany, defending his country at the 38th Chess Olympiad which takes place from November 12th to 25th, gave an interview to the Berliner Zeitung. You can read his surprising answers in an English translation on the excellent website dedicated to chess news Chessbase:

Answer: Women cannot play chess.
Question: But that is no explanation. Wasn’t it your sister who taught you chess?
Answer: That is true, but women are generally much too emotional for chess. If they want to play really well they have to change their character and suppress their natural instincts. They have to take on male qualities. After all chess is a rough and hard game.
Question: Are all chess players machos?
Answer: As a chess player one has to be able to control one’s feelings, one has to be as cold as a machine. We men do not let ourselves be, let us say, seduced by our emotions and feelings. But there is a paradox in chess.
Question: Which is?
Answer: The paradox is that the best chess players are the most emotional ones.
Question: The logical conclusion is that you have to set free your feminine side in order to reach the top ranks in the game – just like yourself?
Answer: Perhaps a little. One must be very passionate and romantic if one wants to create a masterpiece that is to last for centuries. That is my personal approach, which some players do not understand and even smile at. But I don’t care. For me creating a masterpiece is more important than just to win.
As I said I am a romantic. I love literature, art and music. In art Titian is my favorite, in classical music I admire the pianist Svjatoslav Richter. He is full of fire, and I love this kind of fire. In jazz it is Coltrane, but also Keith Jarrett. I listen to this music before a game, it inspires me.

The very end of the interview is almost disappointing...

Answer: Perhaps it is better for your game if you are in love. On the other hand when you are in love there is a danger that your passion is not enough for both, and that you are going to be disappointed with your game and at the same time disappoint your lady.
Question: Are you speaking from experience?
Answer: Yes.

2008.11.23

Gloomy Times

Under the gray and wet skies and mild temperatures we have had lately in this part of the world, I thought it was a perfect moment to open Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance (Gyles Brandreth, Touchstone, 2008, 368 pp.).

The story is told by writer and journalist Robert Sherard (1861-1943) who acts as a perfect Watson to an improbable but very credible Sherlock Holmes, his best friend ("but not lover") Oscar Wilde. Wilde, after meeting Arthur Conan Doyle himself through their common American publisher, is drawn to investigate the brutal murder of Billy Wood, a beautiful boy of his acquaintances, in foggy London...

With great mastery, British writer and former member of Parliament Gyles Brandreth provides us with a thrilling tale of murder, love and deception which has all the ingredients of a page turner. With a good dose of humor.

The author "is planning nine books in the series and they will cut back and forth across Oscar Wilde's remarkable career - from the first murder he encounters as a young Oxford undergraduate in the 1870s to the time, shortly before his death in 1900, age only forty-six, when, to secure food and drink, under the name Sebastian Melmoth, he solves crime for money. Eventually the Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries will follow Wilde's travels across Europe and America and touch on many of the extraordinary - and traumatic - events in his roller-coaster life: his upbringing in Ireland; his audience with the pope at the Vatican; his adventure-filled lecture tour of the United States; his triumphs as a poet and playwright in London, Paris and New York; his fall from grace; his trial at the Old Bailey; his imprisonment; his exile..." All this with a "rich - and realistic - flavor of the remarkable era in which he lived - the age of Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria, and Mark Twain." The second novel in the series, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder (Touchstone, 2008, 416 pp.), has just been published.

A great read for these gloomy times...

2008.11.16

Sweet and Sour

Each morning I receive the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal at my door. Since its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch the Wall Street Journal has been trying to emulate the New York Times with large titles and coverage of more general topics, probably loosing its soul... What a surprise on Wednesday morning, right after election day: the Wall Street Journal was talking about the probable victory of Obama... in Pennsylvania and debating the difficult path to victory for McCain... Compare that to the New York Times' front page: OBAMA. They must have very different closing times...

It is a sad coincidence that the day the first black president was elected in America - the final civil rights milestone - the movement to expand the civil rights of same-sex couples hit a wall in California with the adoption by 52 percent of the votes (and a high proportion of black and Latino voters) of Proposition 8... Less surprisingly, ballot measures discriminating against same-sex couples were also adopted in Arkansas, Arizona and Florida. But, as the New York Times writes in an editorial,

"We do not view these results as reason for despair. Struggles over civil rights never follow a straight trajectory, and the ugly outcome of these ballot fights should not obscure the building momentum for full equality for gay people, including acceptance of marriage between gay men and women. But the votes remind us of how much remains to be done before this bigotry is finally erased."

According to a new study mentioned without reference in the Nov. 18th issue of The Advocate, the strain responsible for the current AIDS pandemic was transmitted from chimpanzees to humans sometime between 1884 and 1924, thirty years earlier than previously thought. The study was published in the journal Nature early October and you can read a good summary by Mary Engel in the Los Angeles Times (HIV dates back to around 1900, study shows).

E. Patrick Johnson is interviewed in the same issue of The Advocate, as his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press) is being published:

"During the Q&A after my show at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - my alma mater - a gentleman stood up and asked what seemed like a hostile question: 'How do you deal with your god, Being gay? I try to defuse those situations, so I said that I have my own relationship with God. Then, after the show, he came backstage and began weeping profusely. He said: 'Thank you so much; I needed this so much.' His therapist had seen the ad for my show in the paper and told him to see it. He had been married for 20 years, his wife left him (when she found out he was gay), and he was estranged from his son, and he was alone in the world. Coming to the show, he found affirmation."

Coming back to the Wall Street Journal, I read a fascinating story in the inside pages of the Money & Investing section by Kate Kelly: His Job at Bear Gone, Mr. Fox Chose Suicide. These are some of the first words of the article, a miniature dark and tragic novel:

"The meltdown of Bear Stearns Cos. in March marked the collapse of the modern securities industry, and the careers of some on Wall Street. The financial crisis also claimed the life of a veteran Bear Stearns manager. (...) Mr. Fox was devastated by the implosion of Bear Stearns and the financial hit he was likely to face, says Fred Philippi, his longtime companion. (...) Mr. Fox, who was 51 years old when he died and had for years struggled with physical and mental disabilities, joined Bear Stearns in 1999 after stints at several other firms."

2008.11.09

Solitudes...

Without anything exciting to read this week, and the US heading towards election day (the only question mark is whether Proposition 8 will pass in California or not...), I turn the pages of the Financial Times Week End, a great paper I try to read every Saturday, but never for its financial information... Gideon Rachman, the FT's senior foreign affairs columnist, has lunch with Alastair Campbell, Blair's former press secretary who is known for his battles with depression and alcoholism (Spin and bare it). After his diaries last year (The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries, Knopf, 2007, 816 pp.) he has just published his first novel, All in the Mind (Hutchinson, 2008, 304 pp.), which is reviewed in the same issue. "Campbell's emotional temperament - and his history of alcoholism and depression - arguably made him a risky choice for a stressful job at the heart of government. Before agreeing to work for Blair, he warned his new boss that he had had 'a serious psychotic breakdown' in 1986. Blair's reply was, 'I'm not worried, if you're not worried.' Looking back, Campbell muses, 'I did have time in Number 10 when I was probably depressed, but you just keep going.' It may be that the relentless nature of the job actually helped to ward off depression. It was only after he left Downing Street that Campbell suffered his second serious bout of mental illness - and underwent the treatment that informs his novel."

In the following pages of the FT Fuchsia Dunlop recounts her experience of dining alone at New York's Grand Central Oyster Bar: "Dining alone in restaurants, like other solitary activities, is a matter of perception. If you feel guility about it and think you shouldn't be doing it, it's dreadful." I personally find that the best places to eat alone are hotel restaurants or restaurants at railway stations: you are just another traveler in transit... And, for that matter, yes, Grand Central Oyster Bar is a great place place to eat, by yourself, as many oysters you can...

Talking about solitude, several pages in The Advocate last issue are dedicated to Peter Flinsch, 'one of the greatest creators of gay erotica'. Gay historian Ross Higgins has recently published a collection of works by Flinsch, including his biography (Peter Flinsch: The Body in Question, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008, 192 pp.). Aged eighty-seven, Peter Flinsch was born in Germany. He spent three months in a Nazi work camp after beeing charged of homosexuality while in the army. He emigrated to Canada in the early fifties. "Flinsch's boyfriend moved back to Germany in 1959," writes Matthews Hays in The Advocate, "and while the artist hasn't been in a long-term relationship since, he says the solitude doesn't bother him. 'I have great freedom to paint and work when I like,' he says, adding that a rich cache of memories keeps him content."

2008.11.02