Gaya Scienza

A Sunny and Warm Afternoon

I was planning to tell you more about Reynolds Price, whose memoir, Ardent Spirits (Scribner, 2009, 416pp), I found interesting but somewhat depressing or sad, especially the second half. As many gay men of his generation he never found a fulfilling intimate relationship. Or so it seems.

I also wanted to tell you about Jon Loomis who recently published his second mystery novel featuring Frank Coffin, the Provincetown maverick detective. I found his first novel, High Season, promising. Mating Season (Minotaur Books, 2009, 304p) the second installement, is as well written as the first, but lacks something, I don't know what, to strike a chord. Maybe it's just the Auther's Note, which precedes the novel:

This book is a work of imagination set in a real but 'fictionalized' place. Some of the locations are actual; many are inventions, adaptations, or amalgamations. (...) I've taken liberties, too, with elements of Provincetown's history, politics, and economy - none of which is as simple as I've made them out to be - for the sake of getting on with the story.

I would have liked, at least, to have the illusion of following his characters in the real Provincetown, and learn more about such a fascinating place. To make things worse, some of the protagonists talk about 'P'town,' a nickname the locals are not supposed to use...

The last two pages of the novel, though, are hilarious. Kotowski, Coffin's old friend, an old gay artist who has recently met some financial success by making paintings of famous Republican politicians (think of Bush, Palin, Cheyney) in awkward settings, starts:

'You're an optimist. I can't take you seriously.'
'I am not an optimist,' Coffin said.
Of course you are,' Kotowski said. 'Otherwise you wouldn't be trying to have a kid. I mean, my god - you've got global warming, economic collapse, war everywhere you look, bird flu, energy shortages, food shortages, that crazy particle accelerator in France, the honeybees dying off - you know what Einstein said, right?'
'Particle accelerator? What particle accelerator?'
'He said that if the honeybees all die, humans pretty much go extinct in four years. Four years!'
'What particle accelerator?'
'But there you are - being a freaking mammal like everything's just fine. How can you say you're not an optimist?'
Coffin raised an eyebrow.
'Jesus,' Kotowski said. 'You're relentless - no wonder you're good at being a cop. There's a new particle accelerator under the French Alps that's seventeen fucking miles long. If the guys who are running it aren't careful, they could produce a black hole that'll destroy the planet.'
'Oh,' Coffin said. 'Let's go outside and have a smoke.'
'Oh?' Kotowski said. 'Oh? A bunch of French physicists might accidentally generate a killer black hole under the freaking Alps and all you can say is oh?'
'What do you want me to say?' Coffin said, pulling Kotowski outside by his shirt.
'Well, some expression of concern would be nice,' Kotowski said. They stood in the sculpture garden, in the long shadow of a tall abstract bronze.
Coffin lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Kotowski. 'Okay,' he said. 'I'am concerned. Happy now?'
'Reasonably content,' Kotowski said, puffing at his cigarette, 'More of less. For the moment.'
A fat skunk waddled across Commercial Street, ignoring them. The Long Point foghorn skwonked, even though there was no fog. Coffin looked up at the night sky. The stars were in sharp focus: Big Dipper, Orion's belt. A meteor blazed and then winked out above the Pilgrim Monument. A good sign, a dark omen. 'Well,' Coffin said, 'you can't ask for more than that.'

I wanted to tell you about all that, but I started to read, this sunny and warm afternoon, Giants - The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer, and was not able to pause. I have not finished it, but it seems to be a great book. More about it next week...

2009.08.16

Summer Books and The Washington Post

I came upon a great blog a few days ago. I don't remember how I found it, but what a great blog! Its focus is gay literature. Earlier this month Band of Thebes reported the amazing comments made by Dennis Drabelle, one of the World Books editors of The Washington Post. Asked to list new gay books he would recommend for summer reading, he provides the following answer:

Does it have to be a new gay book? Not many of these are being published anymore, mostly, I think, because the great gay storyline -- coming out -- isn't such a big deal anymore and has been done to death. But here's a classic you may not have read: Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us, set in an English boarding school. You can find used copies online, and it's well worth doing. A masterpiece!

I thought it was an April's fool, or another kind of joke, for that matter. But it's no joke. You can check. If, at least, he had named a good book of the past, he would have been half forgiven... But Lord Dismiss Us does not seem to fit that category.

My list of summer books includes the second installment of the Frank Coffin Mysteries, Mating Season (Jon Loomis, Minotaur Books, 2009, 304p), set in Provincetown, which has been sitting on my coffee table since April, as well as Ardent Spirit the third volume of his autobiography by prolific author Reynolds Price (Scribner, 2009, 416p), the coming of age story of a young man and a writer. The book was recently reviewed in the NYRB (Sensual in the South) by Edmund White who writes:

Ardent Spirits is an innovation in that it seems to be the first time that Reynolds Price has acknowledged his homosexuality in print. In his fiction and poetry he has touched on homosexuality as a theme, but lightly and seldom at length. In his 1995 novel, The Promise of Rest, a male character comes home to die of AIDS. In Good Hearts (1988) Wesley Beavers (like Mayor Giuliani) takes refuge from a bad marriage with a gay male friend. In Tongues of Angels (1990) a summer camp experience between a boy and a counselor (never openly expressed sexually) forms a bond between the two men. In several poems there is a Housman-like lyricism about the beauty of young men's bodies.
As a writer who wants to be read by his friends and relatives and neighbors, Price has never been explicit about his own desires and has seldom touched on queer life. Bu his deep sensuality, which he freely acknowledges, has worked its way into all his evocations of heterosexuality and his Tiresias-like double vision of the two sexes. It would certainly be crudely reductive to suggest that he could have written better if he'd been more open about his own homosexuality. All on can say is that if he'd been less closeted his fiction might have been as effervescent as his new memoir and perhaps just as insouciant.

I also always like to revisit a classic during summer. This year it will be Redburn, one of Melville's early novels.

***

In the Masterpiece - Anatomy of a Classic series in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Ms. Dobrzynski describes the 'Alexander Sarcophagus,' discovered in the mid-1800s in Sidon, and now at the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul (and not, at the British Museum, as erroneously posted previously). Despite its name it is generally considered as carved for Abdalonymos who was made Sidon's king by Alexander. Mentioning the second most prominent figures, after Alexander, appearing in its friezes she refers to Hephaestion as "Alexander's close friend from Macedonia." Come on, Ms. Dobrzynski, a little effort on this Gay Pride week-end celebrating the 40th anniversary of Stonewall...

Don't miss Frank Rich's excellent column published Sunday in the New York Times, 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans. It ends with these words:

Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

2009.06.28

Cape Cod

I have been willing to go to Cape Cod for sometime now. Instead I opened Jon Loomis' first novel, High Season (St Martin's Press, 2007). Loomis is a poet. It's fairly visible: he knows how to write. He published two volumes of poetry, before embarking in what might become a series of mystery novels. High Season is presented as "A Frank Coffin Mystery". The book came out last fall.

Frank Coffin is a former Baltimore homicide detective who had to quit because of a nervous breakdown. He returns to Provincetown, MA, where he grew up, to become a regular cop, mainly issuing parking tickets and investigating bicycle thefts. Then a famous vacationing TV evangelist is found dead, cross-dressed, on a beach. It is the starting point of an investigation which will transform Coffin.

Although it is well written, at times very funny (as when a young straight cop dressed in drag-queen goes out in order to get information...), the novel ends up being boring. Coffin, a straight man in his forties, is a frightened man, difficult to identify with. He lacks some depth. In fact, as Loomis, through Coffin's shrink, writes, "everybody's got three lives. A public life, which is how you present yourself to the world; a private life, which is what your family knows about you; and a secret life - the stuff only you know about you." "Do you have a secret life?" asks Lola, Coffin's great lesbian police partner. "I'd be a lot more interesting if I did", admits Coffin. He is right...

Most of the other characters in the novel are grotesque losers, specially the gay characters...
At least I thought we would learn something about transvestites or cross-dressers: "Drag queens he could understand, sort of; there was something tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, all that glitter and flash, a kind of burlesque-on/homage-to the whole idea of glamor in all its blowzy, tittering goofiness. The straight cross-dressers were harder to figure out - the just plain transvestite everyone in town called tall ships. The tall ships tended to be large men who strode up and down Commercial Street in plus-sized tweed skirts, support hose, and pumpkin-colored lipstick; craggy-faced and lonely-looking men with dispirited wigs and five o'clock shadows poking through pancake makeup. Sometimes they had their wives, even their kids in tow. They reminded Coffin of his Aunt Connie after she'd been through several rounds of chemotherapy."

The whole story takes place in Provincetown, and the city, on the verge of losing its soul, is one of the main characters. One night Coffin pays a visit to his old friend Kotowski who lives in the last property on Commercial Street's west end, "a hulking, dilapidated thing, perched precariously above the beach." They have been seeing each other every week for the past ten years, "ostensibly for a game of chess, which neither of them played very well or liked very much." When Coffin gets out of his old car, "the moon was rising nacreous and fat above the harbor; a bright path of reflected moonlight wrinkled from the beach to the bay's black horizon." The moon is often present in the many night scenes of the novel and is always described in a very personal way. Kotowski asks Coffin, while they play, "Ever been to Nantucket?" And continues: "Nantucket was abominable. Stepford meets the Disney version of Moby-Dick. The whole island is perfect and clean and cute. Nobody lives there but rich, glossy white people - self-congratulating lawyers and their lubricious trophy wives, completely zombified on antidepressants. Nothing but suntanned morons wearing Rolex watches, as far as the eye can see. Even the dogs look smug. There is no Nantucket anymore. It's all been torn down and replaced with gigantic McMansions. You can't buy a sandwich there for less than twelve bucks. That's Provincetown in a year or two. Except the lawyers and the trophy wives will all be queer." Kotowski is not gay, as he points out, he is "homosexual. To be gay is to be frivolously happy, which I am most definitively not."

Jon Loomis was twice a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives with his wife and son in west-central Wisconsin.

I definitively want to go to Cape Cod. The next "Frank Coffin Mystery" might be a good travel companion...

2008.01.13