Gaya Scienza

Thom Gunn

In a happy coincidence both the TLS and the NYRB recently published papers on Thom Gunn, reviewing essays on his poetry as well as a new small collection of poems selected by August Kleinzahler, initially for Faber in 2007, now reprinted in the US (Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 102p).

Both papers, one by Colm Tóibin, the other by Graeme Richardson, are good introductions to Thom Gunn. Among Gunn's production, Tóibin singles out the following poems "that have about them a slippery beauty, a level of poetic intelligence, which sets them beyond the initial shock of reading them, and beyond any debate about the author's sexuality or his nationality or his doubleness": "The Wound", "In Santa Maria del Popolo", "Considering the Snail", "Touch", and "At the Center". These poems are included in the selection by August Kleinzahler, together with a very good short introduction where he writes:

Gunn is an Elizabethan poet in modern dress. To be sure, an Elizabethan poet passed through many filters, historical, cultural, intellectual, not least the filter of Modernism; but it does no harm when thinking of Gunn's poetry to think of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Jonson transposed to the San Francisco Bay area in the second part of the twentieth century, living through and making poetic records of the raucous, druggy late sixties, through to the 'plague' of the late eighties and nineties, and its aftermath. It's an exciting prospect to conjure with. Gunn is an exciting poet.

Of course it is tempting to take a look...

2010.02.14

Pinget; Still Waiting for John Cromer

First a good news, at least for me: I was finally able to order 'Mapping the Territory' (see previous post) at Amazon. And I could have ordered all the other books from Alyson, for that matter. Without shipping or handling fees. Thank you Amazon! It all was an unpleasant error. A glitch.

Robert Pinget is one of the greatest French writers of the second half of the twentieth century, although he had been somewhat ignored, not only lately. Born in Geneva in 1919, he died in Tour in 1997. He was best known as a member of the Nouveau Roman, a group he did no feel very comfortable with. His obituary (Robert Pinget, 78, a Master Of the Nouveau Roman, Dies), published in The New York Times in 1997, provides a good summary of his life and art. In 2004 the literary review Europe published an issue mostly dedicated to Robert Pinget. I discovered it in my library while selecting books to give away during my last stay in Paris. In a short contribution (Souvenirs de Robert Pinget) Claude Simon writes:

J'éprouvais pour lui non seulement une réelle admiration (je tiens Quelqu'un pour un chef-d'œuvre) mais encore une sympathie particulière du fait qu'il était Genevois d'origine et ma famille paternelle de ce Jura tout proche où j'ai passé mes vacances d'enfant: je retrouvais donc dans ses livres un 'climat' (gens, parler, nature) qui m'est particulièrement cher, et même des situations (comme celle du petit garçon qui se perd dans la forêt en cherchant des framboises) dont l'ensemble constitue en moi tout un monde." Then he adds: "Nos rapports presque impossibles ont-ils été de ma faute, de la sienne (ou du fait de son homosexualité)?

Even The New York Times was more circumspect (but, yes, it was in another century): "After living for some years in Paris, Mr. Pinget, who never married, opted for the isolation of a cottage near Tours in the Touraine region."

***

Instead on working on the sequel to Pilcrow Adam Mars-Jones continues to write for the TLS. He recently (January 8th issue) produced a rather negative review of the play Rope (Patrick Hamilton, 1929) currently shown at Almeida Theatre in London. Rope is based on the infamous real-life crime of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb which is the subject of a thick volume published by Simon Baatz in 2008, For the Thrill of It - Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago. The play was the basis of Hitchcock's movie The Rope, "that perverse reworking of stagecraft into self-absorbed cinematic virtuosity," writes Mars-Jones, after having suggested: "The obvious way to remake the play for a modern audience would be to build this up as a gay relationship, following Tom Kalin in his film 'Swoon' (1992), based on the same crime; to say in effect, 'yes we're monsters, but you wouldn't let us be anything else, and we've come to enjoy it'."

2010.02.07

Amazon Discriminates Against Gay Publisher?

A strange thing has happened to me. This weekend I decided to buy Christopher Bram's recent collection of nonfiction, Mapping the Territory. I started ordering it on Amazon and went through the usual procedure. On the last page, just before confirming the order, I realized that, in addition to the price of the book, I was charged $15.08 for Shipping and Handling, which almost doubled the total price. Because I have a prime membership, I never pay any charge on Shipping and Handling. I went back to the Mapping the Territory page at Amazon, and read that:

"This item is not eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping. This product will incur a shipping surcharge of $3.10 in addition to the standard shipping fees."

My first reaction was to think it was an error. I contacted Amazon's Customer Service and, very quickly, received the following explanation:

Our shipping charges reflect the handling costs for assembling and packaging each order, as well as the cost of shipping. Because exceptionally large or heavy items, such as oversized books or multi-volume book sets, cost more to ship, we do sometimes need to pass these costs along to our customers. This is what happened in this case.

How strange! Mapping the Territory an oversized or multi-volume book? I contacted Amazon by phone, but, although I was taken care of very kindly, I was not able to get an explanation...

Then I tried a few other books from the same publisher (Alyson): same thing. All were subject to a surcharge and none was available for free shipping.

Had it something to do with the publisher then? I sent a mail to Alyson and got back a very clear answer: no.

One thing is very clear: it has nothing to do with the fact that Alyson is a publisher of gay books. The proof: I just ordered the first volume of Melville's works in the Library of America series. I did not pay a dime for shipping or handling.