Gaya Scienza

Rimbaud in Pléiade, version 3.0

The last edition of Rimbaud's Œuvres complètes in La Pléiade, edited by André Guyaux, is a disappointment...

The works are provided according to the chronological order in which they were written. This is now the standard editorial policy when publishing the poems of Rimbaud who, with the exception of Une Saison en Enfer, never produced a book. Unfortunately, André Guyaux's decision to print the text in small characters when a manuscript by Rimbaud is not available produces a strange effect when some of his masterpieces appear in incredibly tiny characters... This is the case for Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat), and some parts of Illuminations.

The notes to the poems are too few. They are not of great help for someone looking forward to entering into Rimbaud's inner world and understanding his obscure poetry. Is it, as writes Suzanne Bernard in the foreword of her edition of Rimbaud's Œuvres, because: "To provide an annotated edition of Rimbaud's work might appear as a reckless enterprise"? She accepted the challenge, though, in her 1960 edition. Or is it because the book is aimed at insiders?

Finally, Rimbaud's attraction to men (not to use the term 'homosexuality', a word and a concept which did not exist at the time) and its influence on his poetry which is largely autobiographical, are almost absent in the commentary and notes. The Préface, otherwise uninspired, provides the only following hint:

True confession is lacking in Rimbaud's work (sic), except possibly in the Foreward of Deserts of Love: 'Not having loved women, - yet full-blooded!' The image of another desire appears later, in Illuminations, particularly in Story, Circus ou Ancient. Hermeneutics, in Rimbaud, is not only a poetic conquest. It remains closely linked to the unacceptable.

Let's take a few examples.

(1) Le Cœur du Pitre (generally known as The Stolen Heart in English) is a abstruse poem composed by Rimbaud in the spring of 1871. He enclosed it in letters to Georges Izambard, his former schoolteacher, and to the poet Paul Demeny (In the famous Letter of the Seer). "It does not mean nothing" did he warn.

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,
Mon coeur est plein de caporal;
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe.
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire général,
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe
Mon coeur est plein de caporal!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs insultes l'ont dépravé:
À la vesprée, ils font des fresques
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques:
Ô flots abracadabrantesques
Prenez mon coeur, qu'il soit sauvé:
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs insultes l'ont dépravé!

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, ô coeur volé?
Ce seront des refrains bachiques
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques:
J'aurai des sursauts stomachiques
Si mon coeur triste est ravalé:
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, ô coeur volé?

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit
They spew streams of soup at it
My sad heart drools at the poop
Under the jeerings of the soldiers
who break out laughing
my sad heart drools at the poop
mt heart covered with tobacco-spit.

Ithypallic and soldierish
Their jeerings have depraved it
In the rudder you see frescoes
Ithypallic and soldierish
O, abracadabratic waves
Take my heart, let it be washed!
Ithypallic and soldierish
their jeerings have depraved it.

When they have used up their quid
How will I act, O stolen heart?
There will be Bacchic hiccups
When they have used up their quid
I will have stomach retchings
If my heart is degraded;
When they have used up their quid
How will I act, O stolen heart?

(translation by Wallace Fowlie)

The poem expresses such a disappointment and such a disgust that it must point to some personal bitter and painful experience. Several commentators have hypothesized that it alluded to a rape that Rimbaud might have suffered in a military barrack during a stay in Paris. Izambard found the poem obscene and ridiculous. André Guyaux only provides two notes: the first for 'caporal' ("A type of cheap tobacco."), the second for 'Ithyphalliques' ("The word is used by Flaubert and in the Journal of the Goncourts"). In his commentary he ignores the rape hypothesis.

(2) Les Déserts de l'Amour (Deserts of Love) is the first known prose poem by Rimbaud. It is short, either because unfinished, or because some parts were lost. In the first part, Foreword, Rimbaud writes: "Not having loved women, - yet full-blooded! - his heart, his soul, all his strength grew up in strange and sad mistakes." No note is appended to this text. In the introductory comment to the poem, André Guyaux writes: "Linked to the confession in the Foreword ('Not having loved women...') the two 'successive dreams', described as dreamed 'loves', combine the themes of purity ('maternal'), obstacles ('cushions', 'canvasses', 'laces'), definitive absence and tears in order to suggest inhibition"...

(3) The untitled poem starting with Ô saisons, ô châteaux (O seasons, O castles) is one of Rimbaud's most famous work. It was later included in Alchimie du verbe (Alchemy of the Word) in Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). No English translation of this poem retains all its mystery.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux
Quelle âme est sans défauts?
Ô saisons, ô châteaux!
J'ai fait la magique étude
Du Bonheur, que nul n'élude.

Ô vive lui, chaque fois
Que chante son coq Gaulois.

Mais! je n'aurai plus d'envie
Il s'est chargé de ma vie.

Ce Charme! il prit âme et corps
Et dispersa tous efforts.

Que comprendre à ma parole?
Il fait qu'elle fuie et vole!
Ô saisons, ô châteaux.

O seasons, O castles,
What soul is without blame?
O seasons, O castles,
I carried out the magic study
of happiness that no one eludes.

Oh! may it live long, each time
The Gallic cock crows.

But I will have no more desires,
It has taken charge of my life.

That charm! it took my soul and body,
and dispersed every effort.

What can be understood from my words?
It makes them escape and fly off!
O seasons, O castles

(translated by Wallace Fowlie)

The only note for the poem is inserted after coq Gaulois: "Robert Goffin reminds the sexual meaning of coq gaulois in Wallony and in the Ardennes and identifies lui, from the preceding verse, to Verlaine (Rimbaud vivant. Documents et témoignages inédits, Paris, Corrêa, 1937); for Sergio Sacchi, lui is more probably the poem's subject, happiness, and the coq gaulois 'the symbol of resurrection, carved in the christian canvasses of the first centuries' ('Le Chant du coq gaulois', Il confronto letterario, novembre 1993)." What is André Guyaux's opinion? We don't know, except that the more recent date of the second reference would point to its stronger relevance... A draft of the poem is however available. Rimbaud had first written: "Je suis à lui, chaque fois / Si chante son coq gaulois" ("I am his, each time / If his Gallic cock sings") which is even more explicit.

The second part of the volume, titled Vie et Documents, "intended to give a better understanding of his life", does not directly address Rimbaud's attraction to men, although it provides documents pointing, sometimes crudely, to it. Most of the known documents pertaining to the 'Brussel's affair' are reproduced. I did not see, however, the 'inverted' sonnet by Verlaine, Le Bon disciple (The Good Disciple), which was found then among some letters in Rimbaud's pockets. Verlaine had given a manuscript copy of it to Rimbaud in May 1872. It provides a rare insight into the relationship between the two lovers:

Je suis élu, je suis damné!
Un grand souffle inconnu m'entoure.
Ô terreur! Parce, Domine!

Quel ange dur ainsi me bourre
Entre les épaules tandis
Que je m'envole au paradis?

Fièvre adorablement maligne,
Bon délire, benoît effroi!
Je suis martyr et je suis roi,
Faucon je plane et je meurs cygne!

Toi, le Jaloux qui m'as fait signe,
[...*] me voici; voici tout moi!
Vers toi je rampe encore indigne!
- Monte sur mes reins, et trépigne!

* début du vers perdu.

I am saved, I am lost!
Mysteriously tempest-tossed!
Oh Terror! Spare me, Oh Lord!

What cruel Angel has gored
Me in the back just as I
Off to Heaven would fly?

Pleasing delirium, cunning fever,
I am martyred, I am Caesar.
Soaring like the falcon I fly,
Singing my swan-song I die!

You beckon, you the Green-Eyed,
Here I am, here all of me!
I crawl to you, though unworthy!
Mount on my back and ride!

(translation by Drewey Wayne Gunn in Ardennian Boy, William Maltese and Wayne Gunn, MLR Press, 2007: an astonishing erotica based on the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, closely following their lives)

So what is Rimbaud's best edition of his Œuvres complètes? Any idea?

2009.03.29

Bits and Pieces

David Mixner has posted this Friday a touching obituary after the stunning accidental death of actress Natasha Richardson, remembering her involvement in the battle against AIDS/HIV. The disease had killed her father, the award-winning film director of Tom Jones, Tony Richardson (In Memoriam: Natasha Richardson). Her death has been a shock in the New York region, where she lived.

***

A new thick biography of John Cheever (1912-1982) by Blake Bailey has just been released (Cheever: A Life, Knopf, 2009, 784p). Many detailed reviews have been published (Basically Decent, by John Updike, who recently passed away, in the New Yorker; Suburban Suffering, by Geoffrey Wolff in the New York Times) mostly favorable. Jonathan Yardley writes, though, in the Washington Post (Good Writer, Bad Man):

Bailey knows Cheever's fiction thoroughly and writes about it well, but readers are less likely to be drawn to this book for what it tells us about Cheever the writer than for its all-too-intimate disclosures about Cheever the man. Bailey's intention seems to be to show how art transcends and improves upon life, but the result is a biography that constantly teeters at the edge of sensation and voyeurism.

(...) Although Cheever was aware of his bisexuality as a very young man, through most of his adult life he maintained a heterosexual front. As he grew older and as society's attitudes about sex began to relax, his homosexual side became more overt; the composer Ned Rorem, with whom he had occasional encounters, said that Cheever "was obsessed with homosexuality, as though hoarding lost time." Probably, the truth was that he was so needy, physically and emotionally, that he would settle for whatever warmth he could get.

(...) No doubt it is important to an understanding of Cheever the man that he was sexually promiscuous and a fall-down drunk, and perhaps it tells us a bit about Cheever the writer as well, but it is one thing for the biographer to reach an understanding of these matters and quite another simply to record, over and over and over again, their quotidian details. Cheever interests us not because of who he was but because of what he wrote. Obviously, it is no coincidence that his writing declined as his drinking intensified, and thus the question of alcoholism must be dealt with. Since homosexuality figures in his novel "Falconer" (1977), a discussion of Cheever's own sexuality is also in order. But Bailey, having been granted full access to everything by Cheever's family and having interviewed zillions of people, cannot let go of his research and puts every detail, however trivial or squalid, into his narrative.

Blake Bailey is also the editor of a two-volume edition of Cheever's work just published by The Library of America.

***

The nominations for the 2009 Lambda Literary Awards were announced last Sunday. 105 finalists, representing 72 publishers, are competing in 22 categories... Winners will be announced on Thursday, May 28, at a gala awards ceremony in New York. The categories I am most interested in are: Bisexual (Open, Jenny Block, Seal Press; Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love & Desire, Lisa M. Diamond, Harvard University Press; The Bishop's Daughter, Honor Moore, W.W. Norton; Kinsey Zero Through Sixty: Bisexual Perspectives on Kinsey, Ron Jackson Suresha, Taylor & Francis; Rimbaud, Edmund White, Atlas & Company), LGBT Nonfiction (Me as Her Again, Nancy Agabian, Aunt Lute Books; If I Could Write This in Fire, Michelle Cliff, Univ of Minnesota Press; Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America 1861-2003, William N. Eskridge Jr, Penguin Group; Beyond (Straight & Gay) Marriage, Nancy Polikoff, Beacon Press; Loving The Difficult, Jane Rule, Hedgerow Press; Drifting Toward Love, Kai Wright, Beacon Press), LGBT Studies (Tomboys: A Literary & Cultural History, Michelle Ann Abate, Temple University Press; The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington, Amin Ghaziani, The University of Chicago Press; Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, Regina Kunzel, The University of Chicago Press; Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, & & the Politics of Progressive Reform, Kevin P. Murphy, Columbia University Press; Screening Sex, Linda Williams, Duke University Press), Gay Fiction (Stray Dog Winter, David Francis, Macadam/Cage Publishing; The Torturer's Wife, Thomas Glave, City Lights Publishers; We Disappear, Scott Heim, HarperCollins; The Conversion, Joseph Olshan, St. Martin's Press; The Boomerang Kid, Jay Quinn, Alyson), Gay Memoir/Biography (Bringing Him Home, Aaron Cooper, Late August Press; Swish, Joel Derfner, Broadway Books; Assisted Loving, Bob Morris, HarperCollins; Edward Carpenter:  A Life of Liberty and Love, Sheila Rowbotham, Verso Books; King of Shadows, Aaron Shurin, City Lights Publishers), Gay Mystery (The Fisher Boy, Stephen Anable, Poisoned Pen Press; Sundowner Ubuntu, Anthony Bidulka, Insomniac Press; Mahu Fire, Neil Plakcy, Alyson Books; First You Fall, Scott Sherman, Alyson Books; Spider Season, John Morgan Wilson, St. Martin's Press).

***

Book Buzz by John Morgan Wilson, is a new a monthly column of news and notable tidbits from the LGBT writing and publishing community. It is published by the Lamda Literary Foundation, and I strongly recommend it. The first column was in January. Each column ends with an interview.

***

Next week I will comment on the last edition of Rimbaud's Œuvres complètes in La Pléiade.

2008.03.22

Proust, Hitler, Shakespeare, Purdy

Paintings in Proust - A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (Eric Karpeles, London, Thames & Hudson, 2008) was translated by Pierre Saint-Jean under the title Le Musée imaginaire de Marcel Proust - Tous les tableaux de À la recherche du temps perdu (2009). After a short doubtful introduction - "La perspicacité psychosexuelle dont il [Marcel Proust] fit preuve pour élaborer ses personnages épicènes l'ont à jamais transformé en père fondateur des queer studies."(*) - the book divisions follow the volumes of À la recherche. Short text extracts in which a painting is alluded to are presented (in the original text from Proust in this 'translation') together with a reproduction of the corresponding painting. It's a great way to wander along Proust's masterpiece, as well as a very useful companion when reading it. For example the lines where Swann refers to Françoise's new kitchen-maid as "la Charité de Giotto" are printed along a reproduction of the Caritas from the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua.

L'année où nous mangeâmes tant d'asperges, la fille de cuisine habituellement chargée de les 'plumer' était une pauvre créature maladive, dans un état de grossesse déjà assez avancé quand nous arrivâmes à Pâques, et on s'étonnait même que Françoise lui laissât faire tant de courses et de besogne, car elle commençait à porter difficilement devant elle la mystérieuse corbeille, chaque jour plus remplie, dont on devinait sous ses amples sarraus la forme magnifique. Ceux-ci rappelaient les houppelandes qui revêtent certaines des figures symboliques de Giotto dont M. Swann m'avait donné des photographies. C'est lui même qui nous l'avait fait remarquer et quand il nous demandait des nouvelles de la fille de cuisine il nous disait: "Comment va la Charité de Giotto?" D'ailleurs elle-même, la pauvre fille, engraissée par sa grossesse, jusqu'à la figure, jusqu'aux joues qui tombaient droites et carrées, ressemblait en effet assez à ces vierges, fortes et hommasses, matrones plutôt, dans lesquelles les vertus sont personnifiées à l'Arena. Et je me rends compte maintenant que ces Vertus et ces Vices de Padoue lui ressemblaient encore d'une autre manière. De même que l'image de cette fille était accrue par le symbole ajouté qu'elle portait devant son ventre, sans avoir l'air d'en comprendre le sens, sans que rien dans son visage en traduisît la beauté et l'esprit, comme un simple et pesant fardeau, de même c'est sans paraître s'en douter que la puissante ménagère qui est représentée à l'Arena au dessous du nom "Caritas" et dont la reproduction était accrochée au mur de ma salle d'études, à Combray, incarne cette vertu, c'est sans qu'aucune pensée de charité semble avoir jamais pu être exprimée par son visage énergique et vulgaire.

In the year in which we ate such a quantity of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to prepare them was a poor sickly creature, some way "gone" in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands and to do so much work, for she was beginning to find difficult in bearing before her the mysterious basket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected beneath the folds of her ample smock. This last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even including her face and her squarish, elongated cheeks, did distinctly suggest whose virgins, so sturdy and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried before her, without appearing to understand its meaning, with no awareness in her facial expression of its beauty and spiritual significance, as if it were an ordinary rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena Chapel beneath the label "Caritas," and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolrooom at Combray, embodies that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. (translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, in the Modern Library edition, 1992)

Now you really want to take a look at Giotto's Caritas, don't you?

***

Very good and concise review of Hitler's Private Library: the Books that shaped his life (Timothy W. Ryback, Knopf, 2008, 304p) by Ritchie Robertson in the March 6th issue of the TLS (Was Hitler a bookworm?). Only a small proportion of Hitler's library survives: "Although enough survives to tell us a good deal about Hitler's mental world, though the reader of this book must not expect too much." "Hitler's library is most remarkable by what it didn't contain." Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. "The other striking absence is literature." "Though carefully researched, the book is carelessly written." If the topic is of interest to you, read the longer review by Anthony Grafton published in the December 24, 2008 issue of The New Republic (Mein Buch). Grafton concludes that "Hitler's Private Library offers clear proof, if any was needed, that Hitler's worldview did not represent, as American propaganda claimed, the culmination of centuries of German thought."

***

I found with great pleasure my copy of the New York Times under my door when I came back home last Tuesday. The pleasure was further increased by the beautiful color reproduction, on the front page, of an old portrait claimed to be of Shakespeare. The painting was recently identified among the collection of an Anglo-Irish family, the Cobbes. It was inherited from Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron. British experts who have been studying it claim "it is the holy grail Shakespearean scholars had sought for centuries: a portrait done in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the original from which other Shakespeare paintings of the period were copied. They said their studies showed it probably was painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, and only a few years from his death in 1616." They add: "The portrait might open a new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on expressions of love and desire for men, not women." The portrait shows a very handsome and attractive man. I let you go to the New York Times site to admire it, and read the corresponding articles (Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late, Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?).

***

James Purdy (1923-2009) died on Friday. Stephen Guy-Bray writes in glbtq that his novels "often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak." The New York Times published a substantial obituary on Saturday (James Purdy, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 94) which made me want to read The Nephew:

In “The Nephew” (1961), Mr. Purdy slyly intimated the elusiveness of human character in the story of a Korean War soldier missing in action whose aunt tries to research his life for a memorial book. She discovers that the boy she thought she knew was a stranger not only to her but to the rest of the family and was quite possibly gay.

2009.03.15

(*) The psychosexual acuteness with which he [Marcel Proust] painted his neither-male-nor-female characters have made of him, forever, the Founding Father of Queer Studies.

Ramon Fernandez, outed by his son.

What is the matter with those sons and daughters outing their fathers? It started many years ago, in another era, with J.R. Ackerley in his memoir, My Father and Myself. The Bishop's Daughter by Honor Moore is built around her discovering her father's double life. Last year Jean Mauriac in a book by Jean-Luc Barré, Le Général et le journaliste, outed his father, François Mauriac (*). Lincoln Kirstein alluded to his father's attraction to young men as reported in Duberman's biography...

Dominique Fernandez has just published a thick, touching (despite the antiquated and sometimes disturbing style, and by moments lengthy pages) memoir on his father, Ramon Fernandez (1894-1944), in which he claims that he was an unavowed homosexual: Ramon (Paris, Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009, 816p).

Ramon Fernandez was the son of a Mexican diplomat and a strong-willed mother from a Provence family. He became one of the most respected French literary critic after World War I, before turning fascist, and a Collaborationist in occupied France... After 10 years of political activism which took him from left to right and active involvement in the PPF, the French fascist political party led by Jacques Doriot, he returned to literature and wrote four books, while succumbing to alcoholism. He died in August 1944, before the Liberation of Paris, thus avoiding the humiliations and ignominy endured by Collaborationists after the end of the war.

Dominique Fernandez has very few direct memories of his father. His parents separated in 1936 when he was 6. They eventually divorced.

J'aimais mon père, j'en étais amoureux, mais c'était un amour interdit, qu'il me fallait refouler, nier, piétiner dans mon coeur - au point, comme je l'ai dit, d'être devenu incapable de m'intéresser à la vie de mon père, incapable de l'écouter s'il parlait, incapable de prendre part à ce qui se passait rue Saint-Benoît [RF's home in Paris]. Je m'obligeais en moi-même à rester étranger à celui que ma mère me désapprouvait de continuer à reconnaître pour mon père.

He retraces his father's life through his papers, his books, the numerous memoirs published about the troubled period (each new publication bringing the fear of new disclosures) and his mother's journals. After finishing Ramon, I long to read, among RF's books, his Vie de Molière (1929, "C'est le meilleur livre de mon père, et le meilleur livre sur Molière - et un des quelques grands livres de critique du siècle, si complexe et subtil que plusieurs lecture n'en épuisent pas le mystère."), his André Gide (1931, with a long chapter dedicated to Corydon) and his Proust (1943, "Un grand livre, à placer à côté du Molière.").

Dominique Fernandez's claims about his father's homosexuality are mainly circumstantial, though credible... The only direct evidence is a later, and barely reliable, testimony from Aragon mentioning a sexual relationship between RF and Drieu La Rochelle.

Despite the tediousness of many pages, Ramon is the poignant memoir of a son. Coincidentally, Le Monde published on Thursday the profile of 41-year-old Dominique Fernandez's son who has recently been appointed directeur du Trésor, one of the highest positions in the French Finance Ministry. His name? Ramon Fernandez...

2009.03.08

(*) Jean-Luc Barré's first volume of his biography of François Mauriac has been released this week (François Mauriac: Biographie intime, 1885-1940, Paris, Fayard, 2009, 648p). Le Monde's review by Bertrand Le Gendre is titled: François Mauriac homosexuel torturé...

New York, Iran, Keynes, Rimbaud

People mistakenly think it's OK and easy to be gay in New York, said Andrew Velez of the Queer Justice League at a protest outside Major Bloomberg's Upper East Side residence a Saturday last month, as reported by New York Blade. Gay men have recently been arrested in Manhattan video stores. At least 30 'false arrests' have occurred in 2008 in six porn stores. Young attractive undercover police officers would agree to consensual sex outside the premises with older men in the stores. On their way out they would offer them money, then arrest them for prostitution... One case is being investigated by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. Paul Schindler writes in the Op-Ed pages of Gay City News (Stop the Arrests):

The accounts given by several of those arrested; the ages of the men and the fact that some of them were tourists staying in expensive Manhattan hotels; and the relationship of those arrests to enforcement actions, under the nuisance abatement statute, aimed at closing the video establishments make clear what is going on.

Doug Ireland wrote a long and very interesting article in the a previous issue of Gay City News on an upcoming book by Janet Afary, a leading Iranian scholar in exile (Iran's Hidden History). Sexual Politics in Modern Iran is to be published at the end of March by Cambridge University Press. In her book Janet Afary 'details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces.' Almost two years after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous tirade at Columbia University, 'In Iran, we don't have homosexuals,' it is a refreshing perspective.

In these uncertain times I am embarking on a long journey: the three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsky. Published between 1983 and 2000, this still unsurpassed account of the life of the great economist who lived through the Great Depression was the first to take into consideration his homosexuality. Skidelsky published an abridged one-volume version of his book in 2005: John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (Penguin, 2005, 1056p). In the introduction he writes:

No one who has read Keynes's correspondence with Lytton Strachey or Duncan Grant can doubt that homosexuality for him was not just a sexual preference, but part of the 'good life' as he then defined it; and while no one would want to argue that knowledge of Keynes's sexual and emotional leanings gives one a better understanding of his economic theory, there are interesting connections to be made between his economic outlook and what Schumpeter calls his 'childless vision.'

Barely arrived in Paris I rushed to buy the new edition of Rimbaud's Complete Works in the Pléiade collection, still hot from the presses. The volume, edited by André Guyaux, is divided in two parts: Oeuvres et lettres (1868-1875) provides, in chronological order all poetry, including the full text of various known versions of some poems (not only variants), as well as his correspondence for the period. Vie et documents (1854-1891), the second section, includes, along with a biographical summary, Rimbaud's correspondence from 1877, as well as other documents contributing to a better understanding of his life (the files from the Brussels Affair, excerpts from Vitalie's letters and journal during her trip to London with her mother to join Rimbaud in the summer of 1874, etc). I haven't had time to dig into the book yet in order to provide a meaningful review. I am surprised that, in his Préface, Guyaux does not directly address Rimbaud's sexual attraction to men... I will come back to it in the coming weeks.

2009.03.01