Gaya Scienza

And New Hampshire Makes Six

New Hampshire became, on Wednesday, the sixth state to allow same-sex marriages. The third by legislation, after Maine and Vermont. Even video games are joining the party... Lyle Masaki, who writes a blog at AfterElton.com, tested Sim 3 and found out that gay couples can marry in the latest version of the popular video game!

Towleroad this week published an information that caught my attention: Gay penguins hatch, adopt chick in Germany. It's exactly the story told in And Tango Makes Three (Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, Simon & Schuster, 2005, 32p), the children book which was the most challenged book in the United States, according to the list compiled by the American Library Association, for three years in a row: 2006, 2007 and 2008. Roy and Silo, two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan who had become inseparable for several years, were given a fertile egg that needed to be incubated. One month later a chick, Tango, was born, after the two penguins had alternatively sat on the egg. The two happy fathers raised Tango, as any other couple...

Cynthia Crossen writes an entertaining column in the Wall Street Journal every Saturday, Dear Book Lover, where she answers questions from readers. This week a reader from New York asked her for help, since although he wanted to read before going to bed at night, he felt too tired, after spending most of his day reading at work. Cynthia Crossen suggested that he read short stories... Which reminded me of a collection of short stories I wanted to look at, not that I feel tired myself... A footnote in the very good edition of Imre that I mentioned last week referred to the "insightful Introduction" of Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt's anthology of gay writing, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand - The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). I did not find it at the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library at the LGBT Community Center in New York. Instead I borrowed the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by the same authors (Viking, 1994, 655p). In his introduction, David Leavitt  writes about discovering his first gay books and about his feeling saddened by the stereotypes: " What I found myself longing for was a gay literature that, rather than fawning over angels made flesh, transformed homosexual experience into human drama." If that's the program of the anthology, the second story in the book, Arthur Snatchfold by E. M. Forster, fits perfectly. The note introducing the story explains:

Shortly after the appearance of his last and most successful novel, A Passage to India, Forster made the decision no longer to publish fiction since he felt he could not in good conscience write any more novels that took place in a heterosexual milieu. As he observed in his diary late in life, 'I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prenvented the latter.' For the next forty-five years - half his life - Forster's literary output consisted chiefly of essays, memoirs, and biographies; in addition, he wrote many short stories on homosexual themes - among them Arthur Snarchfold - none of which saw publication until after his death in 1970.

I now want to read the other stories...

2009.06.07

The Indian Clerk

Each time David Leavitt publishes a new book I look eagerly for the joy I had when I read While England Sleeps, a few years ago. For many months the book rested on my bedside table and I would read excerpts every night before switching the lamp off. Happiness and quiet intimacy exuded from it. At least this is how I remember it some fifteen years later. The novel was inspired by the true love story between a young working-class Welshman, Jimmy Younger, and Stephen Spender in the 30's. After Spender sued the publisher, an out of court settlement led to stopping the printing in the US (where 30,000 hard-copies had already been distributed) and destroying the undistributed copies in the UK. While England Sleeps was republished in 1995 after changes were made. Leavitt was traumatized by the experience. It is said that he never really recuperated and his works have not come back to their previous qualities. Sadly this seems to be true.

The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury, 2007), his latest book, is well written, and thoroughly researched, but moves slowly, seems long. The bulk of the book relates the life of the famous British mathematician, G. H. Hardy, and his relationship with Ramanujan, a young Indian mathematician prodigy he brought to England. It is set mainly in Cambridge during the years surrounding the Great War. The Sources and Acknowledgements pages at the end of the book review the different materials that Leavitt used. If I were really interested in Hardy's life I would certainly have been tempted by one of the books listed in these pages. But the truth is that I am not. I don't find he is a very likable character, even if Graham Greene highly recommends his small autobiography, A Mathematician's apology, published in 1940 and still available from Cambridge University Press. More than anything else, he appears as a sad lonely man, unable to love, and unable to question himself. Of notable interest, in the end pages on his sources, Leavitt writes that "it was from a sequence of novels - Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, all published by Plume) - that I got the most vivid sense of the ways in which homosexual love was expressed, exploited, and manipulated in England during the Great War."

Unfortunately, the fictional parts of the novel are a little bit lost in the almost 500 pages thick volume. They shine like small jewels, though. Young Thayer whom Hardy meets by chance in the hospital facilities built on the cricket grounds at Cambridge during the war, reminds young Edward Phelan from While England Sleeps. I enjoyed a lot the few pages where this fictional character appears, just to regret there were so few. Because of these pages, and because it is a rich, well constructed book, I still highly recommend The Indian Clerk.

2007.12.02