4/24/23. Chicago. I bought a marked-down Karl Lagerfeld sweater at Bloomingdale’s. While the clerk was ringing it up, he asked, “So what are you guys doing during your visit?” JK: “We’re going to Rockford.” The clerk gulped and looked down to the cash register.
4/27/23. Art Institute of Chicago. We had just stepped into the Impressionist galleries when I got a text to proceed immediately to the Dalí exhibit. We had 10 minutes. We ran through room after room of incredible masterpieces from Caillebotte through Cezanne, muttering, “Don’t look at anything!”
4/30/23. Rockford. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Laurent house, we look out the arc of windows at a family of turkeys crossing the lawn.
5/14/23. Fleur Jaeggy, “Sweet days of discipline”, “Many of the girls possess diaries. With little brass studs. With keys. They think they possess their lives.”
6/6/23. I have been binge-reading gay male romance novels since the middle of May. I started the year intending to “do” the Romantics, but other than the Bs (Blake, Burns, Byron, & the Brontës) they are unbearable. Not wanting to waste another minute with Shelley’s toxic fumes, I cast around for something else to read in that tradition and realized there was a living tradition of Romanticism that I had no direct experience of – Romance fiction. And, while I’m at it, why not explore gay romantic fiction?
After almost 50 years of unwavering devotion to capital-L Literature, I’m discovering a genre of pop fiction that appeals to me. And within that genre, I am – no surprise - attracted to stories in the “Pride and Prejudice” side of the spectrum rather than “Wuthering Heights” end: comedies not tragedies. Rom Com screwball comedies with happy endings. E.g. Lauren Blakely, “A guy walks into my bar”, Sarina Bowen, “The Best men” and Casey McQuiston, “Red, white, and royal blue”
… What does it mean that most of the books in this genre seem to be written by women?
7/16/23. Wes Anderson’s latest, “Asteroid City” I can’t wait to see it again. Jason Schwartzman giving Edward Norton a spoonful of ice cream was the most erotic thing I’ve seen in a Hollywood movie in eons.
7/23/23. I read Andrew Holleran's "Kingdom of sand" and then everything else he's written. I didn't know “In September, the light changes” (2000) and wish I had.
All the stories are lightly fictionalized memoirs or personal essays. He doesn’t even bother to invent new details, but reprises the characters, situations, jokes already familiar from his novels. He’s deeply uninterested in making anything up. Often there’s only a hint of a story, and the only momentum is the acuity of his perception. A dangerous method, but he can pull it off. It can be searing, acute, breathtaking, hilarious.
AH has been conscientiously trying to get y life in the U.S. since Stonewall down on paper for 45 years. Is it too much, or not enough? Proust, for one, was primarily concerned with time, memory, love and art; it was only by the by that he produced the essential study of the Belle Epoch hurling into the Great War. All of Holleran’s books have the same tone. His bleakness is so absolute it risks become a lapse of taste. He’s incapable of presenting bliss - or even equanimity - without slathering momento mori all over it.
[Image: Charles Demuth, Eggplant, 1923]
Comments