Through a comment to this blog, I got a straightforward and simple
explanation for the problem I encountered at Amazon several weeks ago.
It was a 'slight snafu'. Books from Alyson had been entered in Amazon's
system with their weight wrongly expressed in pounds, instead of
ounces! 16 pounds for Christopher Bram's book (
Mapping the Territory - Selected Nonfiction, Alyson, 2009, 258p)... I can understand the surcharge for shipping and handling.
Although
Bram's collection of essays is definitively not a heavy weight, it is a
pleasant read. Some of the essays have their merit, including the
central one, a short history of American gay literature, which gives
its title to the collection.
For
the longest time, gay men and women seemed to be a community of the
book, at least on weeknights when we weren't a community of the bar.
With all other public forums closed to us, we searched the libraries
for titles that would tell us a simple truth: You are not alone.
After
asking 'What is gay literature?' Bram provides a down to earth answer:
'The best working definition of gay literature might be that it's the
fiction, poetry, drama, history, and essays written by, about, and for
gay men.' As simple.
Homage to Mr. Jimmy is a short essay
on his novel based on the life of James Whale, the movie director who
invented Frankenstein on the big screen. The movie
Gods and Monsters,
based on the novel, opened in 1998 and was awarded an Oscar for Best
Screenplay. I watched the movie recently with great pleasure and
interest.
Probably the best piece in the book is
Queer Monster, a long essay on Henry James discussing recent publications dealing with James's homosexuality.
It is also a touching kind of autobiography. The following paragraph has a lot of truth to it:
I
loved books before I loved bodies. The bodies didn't appear until
junior high. Gay identity might not be biological, but I believe
homosexual list is. Mine certainly was. It first expressed itself as a
simple desire to see other boys naked. I thought I'd enjoy seeing
anyone naked, and told myself that I took special pleasure in boys only
because there were no girls in locker room or on Scout camping trips.
The first indication that my tastes were more specific came when I was
fourteen and discovered the photoplates of Greek sculpture in my
grandmother's 1920s edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: I found
more depth and magic in the rectangular bulk of the male nudes than in
the smoother, rounder female beauties.
***
I have just finished
The Eiger Sanction,
the first novel by Trevanian. I read it on my Sony Reader, while
working on the treadmill. It's a great mystery thriller, and it grasps
the reader's attention even though it was conceived as a spoof. The
hero, Jonathan Hemlock, a maverick loner, could very well have been an
unavowed homosexual. He is definitively a hard boiled heterosexual.
The Eiger Sanction
contains a few homophobic passages (not out of place in a mystery
spoof), like those dealing with Hemlock's former colleague turned enemy Miles Mellough, pictured not to his advantage as an effete
homosexual. And this is how the crowd gathering to watch the Eiger
climb, the novel's climax, is described: 'And on the fringes, virile
lesbians protected and dominated their fluttering lace-and-mauve
possessions. And male homosexuals bickered and made up.' Curiously,
though, the adjective 'gay' is used several times in its primary
meaning as in: 'His voice was gruffly gay'. Just a coincidence? A wink?
I have downloaded the next novel in the series,
The Loo Sanction, and can't wait to going back to the gym...
2010.02.28
